Harold E. Varmus Quotes

United States, Virologist
December 18, 1939

Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and was the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama, and before that was director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999. He was a co-recipient (along with J. Michael Bishop) of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a Senior Associate at the New York Genome Center.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Harold E. Varmus
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.

Harold E. Varmus
- World
- Long
- War

The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude at team sports and my preference for reading.

Harold E. Varmus
When I was the NIH director, I often expressed envy of institute directors: they had the money and ran the scientific programmes.

Harold E. Varmus
- Money
- Director
- Envy
I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided to go to medical school after all.

Harold E. Varmus
- World
- Real
- School
From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer.

Harold E. Varmus
- Reading
- Simple
- Problem