Senate Confirms New NIH Director

The Senate has confirmed Harold E. Varmus as director of the National Institutes of Health by unanimous consent.

Varmus, 53, who was approved Friday, is the first Nobel laureate to become NIH director. He shared a 1989 Nobel Prize for helping discover oncogenes, the human genes that cause cancer when they go awry.

Varmus also is an amateur scholar of English literature, having received a master’s degree in the field at Harvard University before going to medical school at Columbia University.

The NIH has an annual budget of $11 billion and funds 26 institutes and administrative divisions. Agency programs support more than 27,000 scientists who conduct the vast majority of biomedical research that is done in the United States.

Before being selected for the post, he had never run an organization bigger than his own laboratory at UC-San Francisco.

Varmus takes over officially from Ruth L. Kirchstein, the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, who has been acting as NIH director since the departure last summer of the previous director, Bernadine P. Healy.