In Memoriam: Nobel Laureate J. Michael Bishop for discovery of Retroviral Oncogenes
Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.
Among the many cancer researchers who have passed this year (listed in a post here), Dr. Bishop, who won the Nobel Prize with Harold Varmus for their discovery of retroviral oncogenes deserves special mention. Since Peyton Raus noticed that an infective agent could transfer oncogenic stimulus for formation of new sarcomas in chickens injected with a fractioned tumor lysate, the search for the molecular basis a viral elements could induce tumorigenesis had remained elusive for most of the 20th century. From medieval times cancer had been thought to have some infective component (and people used to think that tumors themselves were able to infect others). The identification that a virus could induce tumors in animals was a revolutionary discovery and many investigators had tried to uncover human viruses which could induce tumors as well for a large part of the 20th century.
Drs. Bishop and Varmuses work to determine the human homologue to the chicken virus led to a revolutionary discovery of how growth factor signaling and their proliferative effects could be explained on the molecular level and how such proteins, when mutated, could lead to abnormal proliferation and growth.
From the AACR
Source: https://www.aacr.org/professionals/membership/in-memoriam/j-michael-bishop/
J. Michael Bishop, MD, a Fellow of the AACR Academy who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989 with Harold E. Varmus, MD, for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, died March 20, 2026, at the age of 90.
Bishop served as chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, from 1998 until he retired in 2009. He presided over a major expansion of UCSF, a university that is devoted entirely to biomedical sciences.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1936, Bishop grew up in a rural area and attended elementary school in a two-room schoolhouse. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Gettysburg College in 1958 and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1962.
After a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany, he joined the faculty of UCSF as assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in 1968. He became a full professor in 1972, and in 1981 he was named director of the university’s George F. Hooper Research Foundation.
In 1970, Varmus joined Bishop’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. They began studying the Rous sarcoma virus to test the theory that healthy body cells contain dormant viral oncogenes that cause cancer when triggered. Bishop and Varmus discovered that the viral genes that cause cancer in humans and animals do not originate within viruses, as previously thought, but instead begin as normal genes within healthy cells that act to control cellular growth and division. This finding indicated that these benign genes (called proto-oncogenes) can be picked up by certain viruses and then transformed into oncogenes.
This discovery that cancer could be caused by the malfunction of normal genes revolutionized the understanding of tumorigenesis and greatly expanded the scope of associated scientific areas such as cancer detection as well as drug discovery and development.
In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Bishop’s honors included election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and as an Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1987, and as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1982, the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation in 1984, and the Dickson Prize in Medicine in 1986. He was presented with the 2003 National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush. He was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of the AACR Academy in 2013.
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