- Person
- Harold Varmus
- Lived
- b. 1939
- Field
- Cancer biology, public health
- From
- American
The story
Harold Varmus was born in 1939 on Long Island, New York, to Jewish parents whose families had come from Poland and Austria; he described himself as a product of the Eastern European Jewish emigration to New York. He studied English literature at Amherst and Harvard before turning to medicine at Columbia, and in 1970 joined J. Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco, to study viruses that cause cancer.
Bishop and Varmus worked with the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus that causes tumours in chickens. It carries a gene called src that turns infected cells cancerous, and many scientists then believed that genes like this, spread by viruses, might cause much of human cancer.
The team made a probe that detected only the src gene and used it to search the DNA of normal, uninfected cells. In 1976 they reported that a version of src was present in normal chicken DNA, and it was later found across the animal kingdom. The virus's cancer gene, they concluded, was not a true viral gene but a normal cellular gene that the virus had picked up from a host cell and carried along in altered form.
This meant that our own cells contain genes, now called proto-oncogenes, that normally help control growth and division, and that can drive cancer when they are damaged or wrongly activated. By 1989 more than 40 such oncogenes had been identified, and that year Bishop and Varmus shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.
The insight reshaped cancer research. Scientists began hunting for the specific mutated genes that drive each kind of human tumour, and drug developers began designing medicines aimed at the abnormal proteins those genes produce. Varmus himself later helped describe mutations in the EGFR gene in lung cancers, including one that makes tumours resistant to targeted drugs. He went on to lead the National Institutes of Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute.
Why it matters
Today's targeted cancer drugs and the routine genetic testing of tumours build on the understanding, pioneered by Varmus and Bishop, that cancer arises from changes in our own genes.
About Harold Varmus
Former English student who showed that cancer genes arise from our own normal genes, guiding targeted cancer drugs; as NIH director he helped make medical research free to read. Nobel Prize 1989.
More about Harold Varmus
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1989 NobelPrize.org
- Harold E. Varmus, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Harold E. Varmus Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.