Varmus
to speak at commencement
Harold Varmus,
the chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
and the former director of the National Institutes of Health, will be
the principal speaker at Caltech’s 109th commencement ceremonies,
which will take place on Friday, June 13, 2003.
“Harold
Varmus is a great speaker, great educator, great administrator and a great
research scientist,” said Caltech president David Baltimore. “As
the head of a cancer institute and the former head of the National Institutes
of Health, he understands and can illuminate the research-and-development
environment in which many of our graduates will make their lives.”
Varmus is
a corecipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, awarded
for research that demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of
a chicken retrovirus. This discovery contributed to an understanding of
cell growth in human cancer. Oncogenes are normal genes that control cell
growth; under certain circumstances, they mutate and direct the cell to
grow at a fierce pace. The research done by Varmus and corecipient J.
Michael Bishop has improved the diagnosis and treatment of a variety of
cancers.
A graduate
of Amherst College, Harvard University, and Columbia University’s
College of Physicians and Surgeons, Varmus was a faculty member at UC
San Francisco for 23 years. It was there that he and Bishop performed
much of their research.
In 1993,
Varmus was appointed by then-president Bill Clinton to serve as director
of the National Institutes of Health. Under his watch, the NIH underwent
dramatic growth. He held that post until 1999 and took over the top post
at Sloan-Kettering at the beginning of the following year.
In addition
to his Nobel Prize–winning work, Varmus also does research on the
replication cycles of retroviruses and hepatitis B viruses. The author
of four books and 300 scientific papers, he has served as an advisor to
pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, academic institutions, and the
U.S. government. Currently, Varmus lends his knowledge to the World Health
Organization’s macroeconomics and health commission and to a National
Research Council panel on genetically modified organisms, and works on
the development of mouse models for human cancer.
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