Harold E. Varmus: Nobel Prize Catapults Researcher into Public Eye

--Harvard's Next President: a candidate profile.

First in an occasional series. Today: Harold E. Varmus. Wednesday: Lawrence H. Summers

Picking up an honorary doctorate at Harvard in 1996 was just another award for Nobel Laureate Dr. Harold E. Varmus. But it was also a bit of a vindication: he was rejected from Harvard Medical School--twice.

Varmus received the degree as that year's Commencement speaker. Of all the Commencement speakers of recent years, Varmus was one of the least known to the Harvard community.

But since he won the 1989 Nobel Prize for his discovery of cancer-causing genes, Varmus--now the head Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital--has become an increasingly prominent figure in the scientific world.

The prize first catapulted him from a professor responsible for a couple dozen researchers to a supervisor of 13,000 scientists and policymakers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose pronouncements about scientific research were front-page news.

And now--even though he rejected Harvard for Amherst as an undergraduate--the Harvard Corporation is seriously considering Varmus for the University presidency.

The 1996 Commencement at which Varmus gave the keynote address wasn't his first at Harvard. As a kid from Freeport, Long Island he came up to Harvard for his father's 25th reunion. And in 1962 Varmus received a master's degree in English here before heading off to medical school at Columbia. (He had long thought that he wanted to become a doctor, though his intellectual interests drifted to philosophy and literature in college.)

After Columbia, Varmus bounced around different research jobs for a couple of years before landing in J. Michael Bishop's lab at the University of California at San Francisco in 1969. It was their collaborative work on the genetic basis of cancer that led to the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (Bishop, who is now a Harvard Overseer, declined through his spokesperson to comment on a potential conflict of interest in voting to confirm his closest collaborator, which would happen if the Harvard Corporation recommended Varmus for the presidency.)

It was Varmus's wife, journalist and book reviewer Constance L. Casey, who brought him back to Cambridge after almost 30 years as a professor in San Francisco. While she spent a year at Harvard as Nieman fellow in 1988-1989, the Varmuses rented a house on Francis Avenue, prime real estate just a block away from the University.

It was on Francis Avenue, less than a block away from Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and from Afro- American Studies Department Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. that Varmus built much of the Harvard political capital he has now.

At least one of his neighbors, literary scholar Justin Kaplan '45, wrote a letter to presidential search committee chair Robert G. Stone Jr. '45 explaining why Varmus is well suited for the presidency. Another, Lecturer in Public Policy Dorothy Zinberg, has a similar letter in the works.

"He's a really extraordinary personality," said novelist Anne Bernays, who is married to Kaplan. "You want to stand near him to see what he's going to say."

While in Cambridge, Varmus worked in the cancer research laboratory of Robert Weindruck at the Whitehead Institute, an independent research laboratory that is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many members of the scientific community were excited when Varmus was chosen for the NIH post, but worried about his inexperience in administrative matters.

"When Harold went to assume the directorship of the NIH, none of us was exactly sure how it would work out because he had never had a position of great administrative responsibility," Weindruck said. "But it worked out brilliantly. He turned out to be an extraordinary director and an excellent spokesman for the scientific community."

Varmus's tenure at NIH saw enormous success for the institute, both in gaining bipartisan political support and in recruiting talenting researchers. The New Yorker called Varmus perhaps "the most effective backstairs politician the Clinton Administration has produced." Congress gave him the highest compliment of all: a $5 billion funding increase.

In October 1999, Varmus, who is now 61, announced he would leave NIH to become president and chief executive of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, one of the nation's largest cancer hospitals. The move brought him closer to his two children, who live in Queens, and increased his salary almost six-fold--to nearly $1 million a year. It also meant the end of his long-time habit of bicycling to work.

He took over in January 2000.

Today Varmus comes to Cambridge often. He last publically visited Dec. 16 when he addressed an orientation event for newly elected members of the U.S. Congress at the Kennedy School. But he says he's not a candidate for the Harvard post.

Varmus declined to comment for this story, saying that he does not want to confuse people at Sloan-Kettering to whom he has made commitments. But in describing why he took the New York job to the Washington Post, he gave a list of characteristics that could be used to describ e the Harvard presidency.

"I was looking for an opportunity to continue to run something," he said, at a "place where science and clinical activities can be brought together in an important way, and in a city I deeply like."