Harold Varmus

Dr. Harold Eliot Varmus was nominated to become the 14th director of NIH by President William J. Clinton and was sworn in by HHS Secretary Donna Shalala on November 23, 1993. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work in cancer research (and the first Nobel Laureate to lead the NIH), his appointment was also notable for his lack of any prior administrative experience. Instead he was known at that time mainly for his scientific work at the University of California, San Francisco, where he had become a leader in the study of cancer-causing genes called "oncogenes" and an internationally recognized authority on retroviruses, the viruses that cause AIDS and many cancers in animals.