For the first of our series Conversations with Giants in Medicine, we spoke with Harold Varmus, who has been the director of the National Cancer Institute since July 2010 (Figure 1). He has previously served as director of the National Institutes of Health (1993–1999) and as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (2000–2010). Among his many awards, Varmus was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with J. Michael Bishop in recognition of their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. The full interview can be seen on the JCI website, http://www. jci. org/kiosk/cgm. JCI: Can you speak about your beginnings in science?

Varmus: I was brought up in a health-oriented household—my father was a general practitioner, my mother was a psychiatric social worker. There was anticipation that a nice Jewish boy from Long Island would end up being a physician; but once I got to college I suddenly discovered a much wider world. I ended up being an English major, writing a thesis on Charles Dickens, running the school paper, getting a C in organic chemistry, and deciding after a prolonged period of ambiguity to go to graduate school in English literature. During that year I decided I would reapply to medical school; I went to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and loved it. I went there thinking that somebody who liked words and books and was interested in the workings of the mind would be a psychiatrist. But then I became interested in internal medicine because of its narrative aspects—the medical history and the detection part of it, figuring out what’s wrong with somebody. I’d never done any science, and that is a key element in the story. However, I didn’t have many choices as a draft-eligible MD in the late’60s who was fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War—for me it was Canada or the public health service. Fortunately, despite not having any research credentials, I was matched with a laboratory at the NIH. JCI: That was Ira Pastan’s lab? Varmus: It was. He was working on release of thyroxin from the thyroid—it seemed like the kind of problem I could work on with my medical training and limited background in science. But before I arrived at the NIH, Ira had developed a