Director's Page

Harold Varmus, M.D.
Harold Varmus was sworn in on July 12, 2010 by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute. Watch his address to the NCI community here, or read a transcript of his formal remarks.

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 >

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