Practicing what he preaches, Harold Varmus spoke from notes he had written himself at a biographical talk he gave to students and other members of the HMS community on April 27. That advice—to “talk from notes” and “write your own stuff”—and other pearls were part of the Leaders in Biomedicine lecture series sponsored by the HMS MD-PhD program.
Varmus reviewed his path from cancer biologist to director of the National Institutes of Health (1993-1999) and to president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (since 2000). He also cochairs the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and is author of The Art and Politics of Science (Norton & Company, 2009). On May 17, President Obama appointed Varmus as director of the National Cancer Institute.
As an undergraduate, Varmus was a student of Dickens novels; he earned a Masters in English at Harvard in 1962. He attended medical school at Columbia University after not one but two rejections from HMS. He later became interested in research as one of the self-described “yellow berets,” like-minded people who served their required Vietnam War-era military service in public health at the National Institutes of Health.
For the next 15 years at the University of California, San Francisco, Varmus focused on developing strong working relationships and on “discoveries and their pleasures.” In 1989, he and colleague J. Michael Bishop won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of “the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.”
“That little trinket comes in handy when talking with a Congressional panel,” said Varmus about his subsequent political engagement, which began at about age 50 with choosing a name for the AIDS virus. “That adventure convinced me I liked dealing with contentious people on public and important matters,” he said.
Among his many accomplishments since, Varmus noted his efforts to globalize science with a multilateral initiative on malaria, his role in building a major free U.S. public library of full-text research papers, called PubMed Central, and his part in establishing a new business model of open-access publishing in the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, family of journals.
