Chancellor J. Michael Bishop
UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop, MD, has been named a foreign member of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science. Bishop was one of nine foreign scientists so named in 2008 for their scientific excellence. He joins UCSF’s Bruce Alberts, PhD, Stanley Prusiner, MD, Allan Basbaum, PhD, Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, Gerard Evan, PhD, Y.W. Kan, MD, DSc, and Frank McCormick, PhD, all of whom were elected to the society for life after a peer review process that culminates in a vote by existing fellows.
There are currently 48 Nobel Prize winners among the foreign members (including one Nobel Peace Prize winner). Bishop and then UCSF research collaborator Harold Varmus, MD, who is also a foreign member of the society, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 for discovering that normal cellular genes can be converted to cancer genes.
The society, which consists of 1,300 preeminent scientists in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries, was founded in 1660 and includes among its historical members such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford and Dorothy Hodgkin.
The full text of the Royal Society’s commentary on Bishop reads as follows:
Professor J Michael Bishop ForMemRS
Chancellor, University of California, San Francisco
J Michael Bishop is a biologist who has made fundamental and far-reaching discoveries about the origins of cancer. Together with Harold Varmus, he discovered that the transforming gene of the Rous Sarcoma Virus (known as v-src) was derived from a normal cellular gene (c-src), the only differences being in mutations that led to abnormal or constitutive activation of the viral oncogene. This work was recognised by the award of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989. Subsequently, Bishop and his colleagues studied the myc oncogene, whose expression they ingeniously regulated by fusion with a steroid-binding protein, enabling rather precise modelling of particular tumours in mice, many of which reflect human tumours. Apart from his distinguished research career, Bishop has been a tireless crusader for the importance of basic research for the understanding and treatment of human disease. He made important contributions to the expansion of the budget of the US National Institutes of Health by his lobbying activity (together with his UCSF colleagues, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner and Harold Varmus) during the Clinton administration, and is a highly valued advisor on numerous scientific advisory boards, including those in Europe. He currently holds the post of Chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco.
