Events

Harold Varmus visits the MRC

Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, and co-founder of the open access publisher Public Library of Science.

Dr. Varmus, President and CEO, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is recipient of the 2008 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, in recognition of his exceptional leadership and innovative contributions to medical research and his efforts to promote science over the last four decades.

On September 24, Dr. Varmus gave the lecture, “Advancing Global Health by Encouraging Medical Science Worldwide”, as part of his acceptance of the Friesen prize.

The event was hosted by the Friends of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FCIHR). The Friesen Prize supports an annual fall lecture by an accomplished speaker of international stature on topics related to the advancement of health research and its evolving contributions to society.

About Dr. Varmus

In 1989, Dr. Harold Varmus, together with Dr. Michael Bishop received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of a class of normal genes that undergo mutation during human cancer. From 1993 until the end of 1999, Dr. Varmus served under President Bill Clinton as Director of the US National Institutes of Health and doubled the agency’s budget over five years. He chaired the Scientific Board of the Grand Challenges in Global Health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He currently chairs the foundation’s Global Health Program Advisory Panel. To ensure that new knowledge is shared widely, he established a public digital library of scientific papers (PubMedCentral) at the NIH. He is also co-founder and chairman of the board of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a publisher of open access journals in medicine and biology.

Learn more about the Friesen Prize: www.fcihr.ca/FriesenAwardEng.pdf.