Clinton Chooses Nobel Laureate to Lead NIH

Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Dr. Harold E. Varmus of UC San Francisco, was picked by President Clinton on Tuesday to head the National Institutes of Health.

If confirmed by the Senate, Varmus would be the first Nobel laureate to lead the nation’s premier biomedical research agency.

The NIH has a budget of $11 billion. It is the major source of funding for cutting-edge research on heart disease, cancer, AIDS and a host of other ills at universities and hospitals across the country as well as its own prestigious laboratories and clinic on a 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Md.

Varmus, 53, shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology with his colleague at UC San Francisco, Dr. J. Michael Bishop, for their discovery of oncogenes, which cause cancer.