J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus interviewed by Jan Witkowski. [Camera view of Bishop, Varmus and Witkowski]

Dr. J. Michael Bishop is an immunologist and microbiologist and 1989 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine for his work on retroviral oncogenes. He serves as Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Director of the GW Hooper Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also served as Chancellor from 1998 to 2009. Since 2004, he also has held the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professorship. Dr. Bishop is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the recipient of any awards aside from the Nobel Prize. Some of these include the National Medal of Science in 2003 and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Award in 1982. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2008 and in 2020, he received the Clark Kerr Award for distinguished leadership in higher education from the University of California Berkeley Academic Senate.

Dr. Harold Varmus is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015, a post to which he was appointed by then-President Barack Obama. He was the recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He graduated from Amherst College with a BA in English literature. He earned a graduate degree from Harvard in English in 1962 before switching disciplines and beginning his journey as a medical doctor. He attended Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India. Dr. Varmus joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health in 1968. In 1970, he began his post-doctoral research in the Bishop’s lab at University of California, San Francisco.