Genes and Cancer

Molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, John Bishop was born in York, Pennsylvania, and educated at Gettysburg College and Harvard University. After completing his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1964, he was medical researcher with the National Institute for Health from 1964 to 1968. In 1968 he became professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco.

At the University of California, Bishop collaborated with Harold E. Varmus, his colleague and fellow department member, in virology research. During the 1970s, they investigated the decades-old problem of the mechanisms by which certain retroviruses were thought to induce cancer. In investigating how a viral gene, or oncogene, caused tumors in chicks, they developed a nucleic acid probe capable of identifying the oncogene that existed in chicken tumor cells transformed by the virus. While doing so, they made the remarkable discovery that an almost identical version of the gene was also present in normal cells.

In 1976 Bishop and Varmus published their findings. The discovery that oncogenes are abnormal versions of normal cellular genes, for which Bishop and Varmus shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1989, altered the way in which scientists view cancer, the normal growth of cells, and the growth of tumors.

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