Harold Elliot Varmus (born 1939), US medical researcher and Nobel laureate. Varmus was born in New York. His parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria, who had settled in New York in the early years of the 20th century. Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with J. Michael Bishop. The share of the Nobel was awarded for Varmus's discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes (cancer-causing genes). Photographed circa 1993.