Papers of Harold Varmus Added to the NLM's Profiles in Science®

The National Library of Medicine Profiles in Science Web site has been enriched by the addition of the papers of Harold Varmus, M.D., pioneering cancer researcher, former National Institutes of Health Director (NIH), and Nobel Laureate. The Library has collaborated with the University of California, San Francisco Archives and Special Collections to digitize his papers and make them widely available. This brings to twenty the number of notable scientists who have personal and professional records included in Profiles in Science.

In 1989, Varmus and his long time collaborator, J. Michael Bishop, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes."

In 1993, President Clinton nominated Varmus as Director of the (NIH) where he was a familiar figure on his bicycle as he regularly pedaled between home and office. The first Nobel Laureate to head NIH, Varmus strengthened the institution's commitment to basic research while negotiating political controversies over AIDS and stem cell research. In November 1999, he became president and director of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The online exhibition features correspondence, laboratory and lecture notes, research proposals, published articles, and photographs from the Harold Varmus papers at the University of California, San Francisco. Visitors to the site can view, for example, Varmus' schematic depictions of gene control in birds, an extensive exchange of letters regarding the naming of HIV, and a photograph of Varmus receiving the Montgomery County, Maryland bicyclist of the year award.

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