J. Michael Bishop—Nobel Laureate in Medicine or Physiology

Abstract

John Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus (1939-) shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery that the oncogenes of animal tumor viruses are derived from normal cellular genes (protooncogenes). This research showed that viral oncogenes— cancer-causing genes associated with a virus—are produced from altered normal genes that the virus has picked up, rather than from viral genes themselves. Bishop, the son of a Lutheran minister, was born on February 22, 1936, in York in southern Pennsylvania (about 20 miles south of the capital, Harrisburg). He received his early education in a 2-room rural school. After completing his secondary education, he enrolled in Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa (about 30 miles southwest of York), where he majored in chemistry. He received a BA degree in 1957. After graduating from Gettysburg College, Bishop enrolled in Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. While there, he became interested in animal viruses, and during his fourth year of medical school, he received special permission from the dean to do research rather than attend classes. He received his MD degree in 1962. From 1962 to 1964, Bishop was an intern and then a resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After his residency, he went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md, to continue research in virology and worked there from 1964 to 1968. In 1968, Bishop joined the faculty of the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, and by 1972, he was a professor of microbiology and immunology. In 1981, he was named director of the university's George F. Hooper Research Foundation. In the mid 1970s, Bishop and Varmus, his coworker at the university, started to test the theory that healthy body cells contain dormant viral oncogenes that, when triggered, cause cancer. They concentrated their efforts on the Rous sarcoma virus, known to cause tumors in chickens (named after Francis Peyton Rous [1879–1970], the 1966 Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine). Previous research had shown that the ability of the virus to cause cancer is due to a particular gene within the virus. Bishop and Varmus discovered that the viral genes that cause cancer in humans and animals do not originate within viruses, as previously thought, but instead begin as normal genes within healthy cells of the body, where they act to control cellular growth and division. This finding indicated that these benign genes can be picked up by certain viruses and then transformed into oncogenes. The discovery, published in 1976, dispelled a theory that distinct, potentially cancer-causing genes of viral oncogenes exist in inactive form in all body cells and that cancer results when the dormant viral genes are activated in some way, for example, by exposure to an environmental carcinogen. Because the mechanism described by Bishop and Varmus appears common to all forms of cancer, their work has proved invaluable to cancer research. Since their Nobel Prize-winning work, more than 40 genes with cancer-causing potential in animals have been identified. Besides the Nobel Prize, Bishop has received many honors and awards. He received the Biomedical Research Award of the American Association of Medical Colleges in 1981, the Lasker Award in 1982, the Armand Hammer Award in 1984, the General Motors Foundation Award in 1984, and the Medal of Honor of the American Cancer Society in 1985. Bishop was honored on a stamp issued by the Palau Islands in 2000.