Friends and colleagues have organized "An Unexpected Life in Science: A Symposium in Honor of J. Michael Bishop," a two-day event beginning Thursday, March 9.
The two-day symposium, featuring talks by current and former members of Bishop's lab, will convene in the Robertson Auditorium at the Mission Bay Conference Center at the new UCSF Mission Bay campus. The event is part of a lab reunion.
Bishop has received numerous honors and awards during his 37-year career at UCSF. He won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, prizes that he shared with Harold Varmus for research that led to the discovery of proto-oncogenes -- normal genes that can be converted to cancer genes by genetic damage. This work improved understanding that all cancer probably arises from damage to normal genes and provided new strategies for the detection and treatment of cancer.
Varmus will give the keynote address at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 10. Former director of the National Institutes of Health, Varmus has served as chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since January 2000.
The full agenda and other details of the symposium honoring Chancellor Bishop are posted on the G.W. Hooper Foundation
website.
Bishop, who is also the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professor, University Professor, and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at UCSF, began at UCSF as an assistant professor of microbiology and immunology working on the replication of poliovirus. Since becoming UCSF's eighth chancellor in July 1998, Bishop has continued to teach medical students and supervise a research team studying the molecular pathogenesis of cancer.
Bishop serves as member and chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board and the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he holds honorary degrees from Gettysburg College, Miami University, Rochester University and Harvard University.
Source: Lisa Cisneros
