Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, will be the featured speaker in this year's Atkinson Forum in American Studies, April 30 at 4:30 p.m. in Statler Auditorium.

The lecture, "The Future of Science in America," will be followed by a discussion with Cornell President David Skorton and a question-and-answer period.

Varmus, who since 2000 has been president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, served for 23 years as a faculty member at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), where he and a colleague discovered the cellular origins of a cancer gene. The discovery led to the isolation of many genes that normally control growth and development and frequently mutate to cancer. For this work, Varmus and his colleague, Michael Bishop of UCSF, received the 1989 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

The annual Atkinson lecture is sponsored by David R. and Patricia D. Atkinson. The lecture and discussion will be videotaped and broadcast May 7 at 7 p.m. on WEOS-FM (NPR) as a special presentation of "Higher Ed in the Round," Skorton's radio show. It also will be available on CornellCast http://www.cornell.edu/video/ beginning May 7.