Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus will speak on "The Origins of Cancer" during the sixth annual Ef Racker Lectureship in Biology and Medicine, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. in Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall, at Cornell. The lecture is free and the public is invited.

Varmus has been director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., since November of 1993, and he is the first Nobelist to serve as NIH director. He is an internationally recognized authority on retroviruses and the genetic basis of cancer. In recent years his work has assumed special relevance to AIDS, through a focus on biochemical properties of HIV, and to breast cancer, through investigation of mammary tumors in mice.

Varmus graduated from Amherst College (B.A. in English literature, 1961); Harvard University (M.A. in English literature, 1962) and Columbia University (M.D., 1966). After an internship and residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, he was a clinical associate for two years at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases in Bethesda. Varmus came to the University of California at San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. J. Michael Bishop in 1970, and he was appointed to the faculty later that year. He became full professor in 1979 and an American Cancer Society Research Professor 1984. In 1989 he and Bishop shared a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for demonstrating that cancer genes (oncogenes) can arise from normal cellular genes, called proto-oncogenes.

In addition to authoring or editing four books, Varmus has written more than 300 scientific articles. His most recent book, Genes and the Biology of Cancer, was written with Robert Weinberg for the Scientific American Library. He also has served as chair of the Board of Biology for the National Research Council, an advisor to the Congressional Caucus for Biomedical Research, a member of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy of Biomedical Societies and co-chairman of the New Delegation for Biomedical Research, a coalition of leaders in the biomedical community.

The Ef Racker Lectureship is named for the late Efraim Racker, who was the Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry and chair of the Section of Biochemisty, Molecular and Cell Biology at Cornell.