Harold Varmus
The Power List 2017 – Masters of the Bench
Harold Varmus
Lewis Thomas University Professor, Weill Cornell Medical College
Harold Varmus has previously been the director of the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer institute. He originally obtained a degree in English literature – with a desire to be a writer – before deciding to pursue a career in medicine. In 1989, he was the co-winner of a Nobel Prize (alongside Michael Bishop) for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes – how malignant tumors are formed from normal cells.
