Mary DeFeudis, Michael Horgan, and Harold Varmus to Recieve UMass Honorary Degrees

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 28, 2010 -- WORCESTER, Mass.— Harold E. Varmus, MD, President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine, will deliver the commencement address to graduating students of the University of Massachusetts Worcester at the institution’s 37th Commencement Exercises, to be held Sunday, June 6. Dr. Varmus shared the Nobel Prize with J. Michael Bishop, MD, for their studies of the genetic basis of cancer.

About Harol Varmus:

Born in New York, Varmus earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Amherst College and a master’s degree in English at Harvard University before deciding to focus on a career in science. He graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and in 1970 joined the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Bishop’s laboratory; he joined the faculty in 1972 and was named full professor in 1979. It was at UCSF that Varmus and Bishop conducted the work that led to the Nobel Prize: their discovery of the cellular origins of a viral oncogene, a finding that led to the identification of many genes that control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer.

Harold Varmus     Mary Defeudis     Michael Horgan