Harold Varmus nominated to head

President Clinton announced his intention on
August 3 to nominate UCSF's Harold Varmus
to the nation's most prominent position in
biomedical science -director of the National
Institutes of Health.
In a press release issued by the White
House, President Clinton said, "As one of the
world's leading medical researchers, Harold
Varmus will bring great strength and leader-
ship to the National Institutes of Health."
Health & Human Services secretary Donna

Shalala said, "We are delighted that Dr.
Varmus will be our new NIH director - the
first to have won a Nobel prize ... He has been
working at the cutting edge of modern cell
and molecular biology, and has had an active
relationship with the NIH for some 30 years,
as NIH intramural scientist, grantee and pub-
lic advisor."
In 1989, Varmus and fellow microbiologist
J. Michael Bishop, head of the UCSF Hooper
Foundation, won the Nobel Prize for Physiol-
ogy or Medicine for their studies of genes that
play a role in human cancer. They found that
certain genes, called oncogenes, in normal
cells can be "turned on" by chemicals, viruses
and other substances to cause cancer.
Varmus, who has taught at UCSF since
1970, also spends much of his time exploring
howthe genescarried bytheAlDSvirus allow
it to do its deadly work.
He is the American Cancer Society Profes-
sor in Molecular Virology and is the recipient
of the 1982Albert Lasker Prize, which he also
shared with Bishop, the 1983 Armand Ham-

the NIH

mer Prize for cancer research, the 1984Alfred
P. Sloan Prize of the General Motors Cancer
Research Foundation and the 1982 Califor-
nia Scientists of the Year Award.
Upon receiving word of his nomination
Varmus said, "I'm pleased and flattered to be
the intended nominee for the director of the
NIH. Assuming the confirmation process goes
smoothly, I look forward to facing the many
new challenges the job entails."
Chair of the Board of Biology for the Na-
tional Research Council and an advisor to the
congressional Caucus for Biomedical Re-
search, Varmus has served on several review
and advisory boards for government, bio-
technology firms and pharmaceutical compa-
nies. Most recently he was a member of the
Institute of Medicine committee that advised
the Department of Defense on the use of
$210 million allocated by Congress last year
for breast cancer research. In 1986, hechaired
the subcommittee of the International Com-
mittee on the Taxonomy of Viruses that gave
the AIDS virus the name HIV.

Harold Varmus