2 Calif. Doctors Win Nobel; Frenchman Claims Credit : Researched Genes’ Role in Cancer
Americans J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus won the Nobel Prize for medicine today for their research indicating that the “seeds of cancer” lie in common genes.
But in Lille, France, a French researcher who worked for the pair in the 1970s said he did the work on the winning project and should have at least shared the prize.
Bishop, 53, and Varmus, 49, work in the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.
“I was stunned” to learn of the award, said Bishop, who lives in Belvedere, outside San Francisco.
Varmus said that a radio reporter called him with the news and that he was disbelieving at first.
“I am very disappointed,” said Dr. Dominique Stehelin, a director of research for the National Center for Scientific Research on post at the Pasteur Institute in Lille. “I find all that very unfair and rotten.”
“I did the work all by myself, from A to Z,” Stehelin said. “I spent three years in their San Francisco lab, from 1972 to 1975, at a time when nobody other than me was working on the subject and I am not even associated in this distinction.”
“This work belongs to me,” he said, “and I don’t know why the scientific community refuses to attribute the discovery to me. Undoubtedly because working in Lille is judged less prestigious than being a researcher in San Francisco.”
The 50-member Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden’s largest and oldest medical university, cited Bishop and Varmus “for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.”
In 1976, Bishop and Varmus “published the remarkable conclusion that the oncogene in the virus did not represent a true viral gene, but instead was a normal cellular gene,” the citation said.
That is, cancer viruses cause cancer with the help of animal genes that have become incorporated into the viruses. The animal genes normally help control the regular growth of cells. But when the genes become part of viruses, they can trigger the uncontrolled cell growth that typifies cancer tumors.
‘Widened Our Insight’
The research helped scientists understand how cancer begins, and it “widened our insight into the complicated signal systems which govern the normal growth of cells,” the assembly said.
The first oncogenic virus was discovered in 1916, but its operation was not fully understood until nearly 50 years later.
The two men will share a $469,000 cash prize.
In 1982, Bishop and Varmus were among the winners of the Albert Lasker Award, the most prestigious American medical research award.
Bishop was born in York, Pa., studied at Gettysburg College and Harvard and worked for a time in the National Institutes of Health outside Washington.
Varmus was born in Oceanside, N.Y. He studied at Amherst College, and earned his master’s degree at Harvard in 1962, the same year Bishop earned his medical degree there. Varmus received a doctorate from Columbia University in 1966.
