Biology: Nobel Prize-Winning Cell Biologists J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus
In 1989, scientists J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for an experiment conducted in 1976, based on their team’s research work in the field of retroviral oncogenes and their cellular origins, compiled throughout the decade of the 1970s. The work of these scientists contributed to our understanding of cancer, in that their findings revolutionized the way in which the disease was approached, studied, thought about, and understood. According to molecular biologist and fellow Nobel Prize-winner David Baltimore, Bishop and Varmus made their discoveries, “there was only speculation that cancer had a genetic component. Now there is a certainty.” (McKenzie, 1989). According to the Nobel Prize Committee, through their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, Bishop and Varmus “set in motion an avalanche of research on factors that govern the normal growth of cells” (Lindsten (ed), 1993). The work of these scientists is important enough in that they uncovered a new perspective and consequently new insights into one of the most complex phenomena in biology, the group of diseases considered cancer (Lindsten, (ed), 1993).
