Harold E. Varmus

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. 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.