Dr. Harold Eliot Varmus, M.D. is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and was the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Dr. Varmus was a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a Senior Associate at the New York Genome Center. He serves as a member of the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board, the Global Health Advisory Board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lasker Foundation Prize Jury, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT.