Word: varmus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will be the speaker at Harvard's 35th Commencement on June 6, according to yesterday's Harvard University Gazette...
...Varmus was a professor of microbiology, biochemistry and biophysics and the American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) before joining the NIH in 1993, according to a statement released by the NIH Office of Communications...
...Varmus and J. Michael Bishop, M.D., also from UCSF, won the Nobel in physiology of medicine for "demonstrating that cancer genes (oncogenes) can arise from normal cellular genes, called proto-oncogenes," the NIH statement said...
Other genetics experts argue that the time has come to re-evaluate the approach taken by most gene therapists, and perhaps even to redirect their efforts. Last spring Dr. Harold Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health, appointed an independent committee of scientists to look into how the NIH spends its gene-therapy research dollars (some $200 million a year) and whether the government is getting its money's worth. "I've been a bit concerned that we weren't fulfilling the promise of gene therapy in any obvious way at this point," Varmus explains. "My intuition tells...
Some of this is unavoidable. Even the NIH's Varmus acknowledges the legitimate role commercial investment plays in moving gene therapy forward. The danger is that overreliance on commercial investors could change the kind of science that gets done. "The involvement of privately funded companies is already moving the focus away from rare genetic disorders," says Doris Zallen, a member of the NIH advisory panel that reviews gene-therapy trials for safety. Private investors tend to be more interested in diseases that affect large numbers of potential customers...