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1993.08.03 :  Apointment of Harold Varmus 

Contact: HHS Press Office   (202) 690-6343
August 3, 1993

     HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala today hailed President Clinton's
nomination of Harold Eliot Varmus, M.D., to be director of the National
Institutes of Health.
     "We are delighted that Dr. Varmus will be our new NIH director --the first
NIH director to have won a Nobel prize--because he is one of the world's most
eminent and most honored biomedical scientists," Secretary Shalala said.  "He
has been working at the cutting edge of modern cell and molecular biology,
and he has had an active relationship with NIH for some 30 years, as NIH
intramural scientist, grantee and public advisor.  He has taken a leading role
in national discussion of science policy issues."
     Dr. Varmus, 53, is a professor of microbiology, biochemistry, and
biophysics, and the American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Virology at
the University of California, San Francisco.  He is a leader in the study of
cancer-causing genes called "oncogenes," and an internationally recognized
authority on retroviruses, the viruses that cause AIDS and many cancers in
animals.
     Dr. Varmus and his UCSF colleague J. Michael Bishop, M.D., shared a
Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for demonstrating that cancer
genes (oncogenes) can arise from normal cellular genes, called
proto-oncogenes.  While investigating a retroviral gene, v-src, responsible for
causing tumors in chickens, they discovered a non-viral src gene, very similar
to v-src, present in the normal cells of birds and mammals.
     In recent years, his work has assumed special relevance to AIDS, through a
focus on biochemical properties of HIV, and to breast cancer, through
investigation of mammary tumors in mice.  His research activities are currently
supported by grants from the NIH; by his professorship from the American
Cancer Society; and by the Melanie Bronfman Award for Breast Cancer.
     Dr. Varmus is chairman of the Board of Biology for the National Research
Council, an advisor to the Congressional Caucus for Biomedical Research, a
member of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy of Biomedical
societies, and co-chairman of the New Delegation for Biomedical Research, a
coalition of leaders in the biomedical community.  He directed "Winding Your
Way Through DNA," a popular public symposium on recombinant DNA staged
by UCSF last fall.
     The author or editor of four books and nearly 300 scientific papers, Varmus
has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of
Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  His most recent
book, "Genes and the Biology of Cancer," intended for a general audience, was
coauthored with Robert Weinberg for the Scientific American Library.  He is an
editor for several professional journals, and has served on a variety of review
and advisory boards for government, biotechnology firms, and pharmaceutical
companies.  Most recently, he was a member of the Institute of Medicine
committee that advised the Department of Defense on the use of $210 million
allocated by Congress last year for breast cancer research.  In 1986, he chaired
the subcommittee of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses
that gave the AIDS virus its name HIV.
     Dr. Varmus was born Dec. 18, 1939.  He attended public schools in
Freeport, Long Island, N.Y. His father (Frank) practiced family medicine, and
his mother (Beatrice) was a psychiatric social worker.  He is a graduate of
Amherst College (B.A. 1961), where he majored in English literature; Harvard
University (M.A. in English literature, 1962); and Columbia University (M.D.
1966).  While at medical school, he worked for three months at a mission
hospital in northern India.
     After an internship and residency in internal medicine at
Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Varmus served as a clinical
associate for two years at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic
Diseases in Bethesda, Md., where he did his first scientific work in the area of
bacterial genetics with Ira Pastan, M.D.
     Dr. Varmus came to UCSF as a postdoctoral fellow in Bishop's laboratory in
1970, initiating a longstanding collaboration to study tumor viruses, and was
appointed to the faculty later that year.  He became a full professor in 1979
and an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 1984.
     Dr. Varmus lives in San Francisco with his wife, Constance Casey, a book
critic for the Los Angeles Times.  They have two sons --Jacob, who studies at
the University of Iowa, and Christopher, who attends high school in San
Francisco.