Harold Varmus

Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health, has served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since January 2000.

Co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School, he and Dr. J. Michael Bishop and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus, leading to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. He 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.

In 1993, he was named by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until the end of 1999. During his tenure at the NIH, he initiated many changes in the conduct of intramural and extramural research programs, planned three major buildings on the NIH campus, and helped to initiate the five-year doubling of the NIH budget.

Under his leadership at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center a new research building, the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center, has been constructed, and new graduate training programs have been established in chemical, computational, and cancer biology. Dr. Varmus has also overseen the construction of new clinical facilities, the planning of a new center for breast cancer treatment and imaging, the founding of a hospital-based program in translational research, and the development of the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative. In addition, he helped found a new cancer clinic in central Harlem, and new programs for diversity and gender equity.

For more information, please contact Joyce D. Javois at resjdj@gwumc.edu