2010-05-18
President
Barack Obama has named Dr. Harold Varmus, who shared the Nobel Prize for
physiology or medicine while at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
to head the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Varmus was at the University of California,
San Francisco for 23 years and currently is president of Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Varmus will be the first former NIH director - a position he held under President
Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1999 - and Nobel laureate to lead the NCI.
Varmus
shared his Nobel Prize in 1989 with J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating the
cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. That led to the
isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development
and are frequently mutated in human cancer.
Last year, President Obama appointed Dr. Varmus to the president’s
science and technology advisory council.
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