Harold E. Varmus (1939- )

Awarded the Prize “for his discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.”

American virologist. Varmus was born on December 18, 1939 at Oceanside, N.Y. He was educated at Amherst College, taking B.A. in 1961; at Harvard, taking his M.A. in 1962 at Columbia University, where he studied medicine took his M.D. in 1966. In 1968 he joined the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, then he moved to the Department of Microbiology at the University of California at San Francisco. He was appointed a full professor in 1979.