- Person
- Harold Varmus
- Lived
- b. 1939
- Field
- Cancer biology, public health
- From
- American
The story
Harold Varmus, born in 1939 on Long Island to Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing that cancer genes arise from normal cellular genes. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him director of the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of medical research in the world, a post he held until the end of 1999.
At the time, the results of research paid for by taxpayers were mostly published in journals that charged high subscription fees. Doctors in poorer countries, small hospitals, students, journalists and patients trying to understand their own illnesses often could not read them.
Near the end of his tenure, Varmus became a leading champion of using the internet to change this. Working with David Lipman of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the NIH's National Library of Medicine, he established PubMed Central, a public digital library of full-length scientific articles that anyone can read without charge. In 2007 Congress directed the NIH to ensure that all papers reporting research it funds appear in PubMed Central within a year of publication.
Varmus also joined the biochemist Patrick Brown of Stanford and the biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, in co-founding the Public Library of Science, known as PLOS. It became a non-profit publisher of journals in biology and medicine whose articles are free for everyone to read and reuse, and it helped prove that open-access publishing could work on a large scale.
These efforts helped launch the worldwide open-access movement. Many governments and research funders now require the research they pay for to be freely available, and Varmus went on to lead Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute while continuing to argue for wider access to scientific knowledge.
Why it matters
PubMed Central and open-access journals let doctors, students and patients everywhere read publicly funded medical research for free.
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
- Harold E. Varmus Wikipedia
- Harold E. Varmus, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- PubMed Central 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.