Like peas in a pod

In January, Harold Varmus will begin the next stage in an unusual career. He’s gone from English literature to medicine to bench science to Washington science bureaucrat, and now he becomes the well-paid (some would say extremely well-paid) president of a private, not-for-profit treatment and research facility, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He’s succeeded in everything else he’s tried, so it’s a good bet he’ll succeed in this latest role, too. It might seem like the jump from English to medicine was the biggest one, but Varmus will tell you that an even bigger leap was going from scientist to science bureaucrat. By his own admission, just a few years before becoming director of the NIH in 1992 his interest in the politics of science was practically non-existent. He was running a successful lab at the University of California, San Francisco and, with Michael Bishop, he won the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on viruses and their relationship to oncogenes. But as he tells it, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, several events occurred that brought Varmus off the political sidelines. First, a quirk in funding patterns led to an unusually low success rate for new grants, especially among first-time applicants. Second, there was a series of misconduct scandals that seemed to tarnish the public’s traditionally high regard for scientists. And finally, the Reagan administration seemed bent on shifting the support for science from basic to applied research as a way of justifying the multi-billion dollar federal research budget. Varmus felt he couldn’t sit idly by in the face of these threats. What’s more, his newly bestowed Nobel Prize gave him unusual access to both the media and the political establishment. Varmus entered the fray. In part, he blames two people for getting him engaged: his colleagues Marc Kirschner and Bruce Alberts, both then at UCSF. Varmus says Alberts in particular convinced him to take a more active role in solving the funding problems facing scientists. And, says Varmus, “when Bruce, as newly elected President of the NAS, was asked to chair a search committee to find a new NIH Director, my fate was sealed.” Although outsiders are frequently hauled into Washington, it’s rare to put someone at the top of an 11 billion dollar federal agency with no experience of managing anything larger than a personal laboratory. But those who knew him were convinced Varmus could accomplish anything he set his mind to. “I think Harold not only proved us all right,” says UCSF’s Keith Yamamoto, “but far exceeded anything any of us expected. He turned out not only to be a capable administrator, even though he lacked that experience, but he has just done a masterful job.” Yamamoto says being NIH director did not change Varmus’ style all that much. “What Harold did was to go there as a scientist and say, ‘look, we can do things the way we do in the laboratory, we can do experiments, and if they work, we can implement them.’’ Yamamoto says one of his big achievements was to start to overhaul the peer review process for approving grants. According to Yamamoto the new system will allow for more innovative if more risky research to have a better chance of being funded. Another project with broad implications is Varmus’ plan to put all biomedical research papers online — by means of the new NIH publishing venture, PubMed Central. Tom Pollard, the president of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, says the project reflects the kind of forward thinking Varmus is capable of. “The idea is to allow the scientific community all around the world access to the major publications in an electronic form so that anybody could have access to any piece of information without restriction, whether they were in a small institution here in the US or in any other part of the world.” PubMed Central will be launched early next year by the NIH, albeit as a somewhat watered-down version of the original idea. Although Varmus won widespread praise for his leadership at NIH, both from politicians and fellow science bureaucrats, he never stopped behaving more like a scientist. He maintained an active laboratory within the National Cancer Institute, and rode his bicycle to work, frequently showing up at his office in sweaty clothes, changing into a suit only if the day’s activities required. Varmus is an intense man — not surprising considering all he manages to accomplish in a given day. He can intimidate lesser minds, and has little patience for sloppy thinking. “He’s not what I would describe as cuddly,” remarks one senior NIH official, “but if he thinks you’re right, he’ll be one of your fiercest defenders.” Magazine R907