Varmus to lead NCI

After months of rumors, President Barack Obama has finally announced that linkurl:Harold Varmus;http://www.mskcc.org/mskcc/html/515.cfm will be the next head of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, the linkurl:__New York Times__;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/health/18cancer.html reported yesterday (17th May).Image: Public Library of Science Varmus will be the first Nobel Prize winner and the first former-NIH director to lead the NCI. The geneticist, who has wo

Written byBob Grant

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Image: Public Library of Science

Varmus will be the first Nobel Prize winner and the first former-NIH director to lead the NCI. The geneticist, who has worked most recently as president of New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, won the 1989 linkurl:Nobel Prize;http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1989/varmus-autobio.html in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, and served as NIH director from 1993 to 1999. In March, __The Cancer Letter__ ran a linkurl:story;http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy130_of_whats-going-on-with-nih reporting that Varmus was likely to get the top spot at NCI, but he rejected the scuttlebutt, writing in an email to linkurl:__ScienceInsider__,;http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/03/varmus-dispels-cancer-institute.html "I have no idea where you are getting such rumors but I can tell you that no one from the only reputable source, the White House, has contacted me!" The 70-year-old Varmus starts his new job at NCI in mid-July.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Varmus to lead NCI?;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57223/
[18th March 2010]*linkurl:Varmus to quit as Sloan-Kettering head;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56268/
[12th January 2010]*linkurl:Varmus, Lubchenco top Obama team;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55317/
[22nd December 2008]

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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