UCSF 'Giants in Medicine' Discuss Their Distinguished Careers

Two UCSF trailblazers are featured in a new interview series by The Journal of Clinical Investigation called “Conversations with Giants in Medicine.”

Harold Varmus, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute who became a Nobel laureate while at UCSF, kicked off the series in April, sitting down with JCI’s editor at large, Ushma S. Neill, to talk about his path to medicine. The son of a general practitioner and a psychiatric social worker, Varmus initially gravitated toward literature but eventually became interested in internal medicine “because of its narrative aspects – the medical history, the detection part of it, figuring out what’s wrong with somebody.”

His cancer research led him to UCSF, where he and former UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop, MD, would earn the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating the cellular origins of retroviral oncogenes.

After a 23-year research career at UCSF that he described as living “in a kind of scientific nirvana,” Varmus decided to move on to focus his work on political and governmental decisions affecting science. He went on to lead the National Institutes of Health and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center before taking his current post at the National Cancer Institute.

Neill also interviewed Lloyd “Holly” Smith Jr., MD, who chaired UCSF’s Department of Medicine from 1964 to 1985 and is credited with helping transform the University into a world-class medical institution.

Smith recounted his varied career, serving on President Richard Nixon’s Presidential Scientific Advisory Committee, helping the shah of Iran establish an academic medical center and becoming chairman of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Medical Advisory Board. “I like to tell the joke sometimes that I worked with the three most problematic people of our time, Richard Nixon, the shah and Howard Hughes,” he said.

When asked what career he would have chosen besides medicine, Smith said he never considered anything else: “My own career has been rather strenuous at times but very fulfilling. It has been a privilege to be part of UCSF as it has emerged as an eminent institution over the past generation.”