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Director's Page

Harold Varmus, M.D.
Harold Varmus, M.D. Harold Varmus, M.D.
Director, National Cancer Institute

At a July 27, 2011, town hall meeting marking his first year as NCI director, Harold Varmus reflected on what he sees as the main accomplishments of his tenure so far and described five areas of "shared ambition" toward which he hopes to guide NCI in the near future. See a summary of his remarks which also includes links to  recent interviews with Dr. Varmus that have appeared in Nature, Science, and The Cancer Letter.

Harold Varmus, M.D., co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, was nominated by President Obama as Director of the National Cancer Institute on May 17, 2010. He began his tenure as NCI Director on July 12, 2010. He previously served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Much of Varmus' scientific work was conducted during 23 years as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School, where he and Dr. J. Michael Bishop and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. This discovery led to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. For this work, Bishop and Varmus received many awards, including the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Varmus is also widely recognized for his studies of the replication cycles of retroviruses and hepatitis B viruses, the functions of genes implicated in cancer, and the development of mouse models of human cancer (the focus of much of the work in his laboratory at MSKCC). Read More >