Nobelist Named to Lead UC San Francisco

Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher Dr. J. Michael Bishop was appointed Friday as chancellor of UC San Francisco.

The choice, unanimously approved by the University of California Board of Regents, marks the first time a laboratory scientist, rather than a practicing physician or dentist, has been named to run the San Francisco campus, one of the nation’s most prestigious medical research centers.

Bishop, who has spent 30 years on the school’s faculty, called his new job “both exhilarating and daunting,” particularly in overseeing the 134-year-old institution’s plans to double the size of its research laboratories by creating a second campus near downtown San Francisco.

“We have a large cadre of people who work on fundamental research,” he said. “I would like to see us develop an equivalent cadre whose basic interest is on human disease. My betting is that we are going to turn UCSF into one of the world’s premier sites for human disease research.”

Bishop, 61, has emerged in recent years as a leading voice on national science policy. President Clinton recently appointed him chairman of the National Cancer Advisory Board, which oversees the National Cancer Institute.

Bishop won the 1989 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology with his colleague Dr. Harold E. Varmus for identifying aberrant genes that cause cancer. Varmus is now head of the National Institutes of Health. Their 1976 discovery is widely credited with sparking a revolution in cancer research.

In nominating Bishop for the San Francisco job, UC President Richard C. Atkinson cited his “international renown” as a cancer researcher and his skills as an inspirational teacher, eloquent speaker and effective fund-raiser. The appointment will be effective July 1.

As chancellor, Bishop will earn $274,000 annually overseeing UC San Francisco’s medical center, its schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, and assorted graduate programs, the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center and half of UCSF Stanford Health Care--the new entity formed to manage hospitals at both schools.

UC San Francisco, which has no undergraduate students, is the only one of the nine UC campuses devoted solely to health sciences. It has 13,000 faculty and staff and 3,700 students, residents and interns, and an annual budget of $850 million.

Bishop will succeed Dr. Haile T. Debas, the UC San Francisco Medical School dean, who reluctantly agreed last year to be interim chancellor after former Chancellor Joseph B. Martin left hastily to become dean of Harvard Medical School. Debas will return to his previous duties.

Bishop, the son of a Lutheran minister in rural Pennsylvania, graduated from Gettysburg College and Harvard Medical School.

He joined UC San Francisco in 1968 as a professor of microbiology and immunology. He soon teamed up with Varmus in the lab to make the discovery that helped science understand that all human beings carry the seeds of their own destruction: Genes in normal cells can cause cancer if something knocks them off track.

The day their discovery won the Nobel Prize, Bishop and Varmus, both Giants baseball fans, quietly slipped away from the commotion to attend a playoff game.

And now, Bishop noted, he will supervise building a health sciences campus next to San Francisco’s planned new ballpark.

“The one thing I hope to get out of the chancellor job,” Bishop quipped, “is to improve my seating at Pac Bell Park.”