October 12, 2003 Advertise Subscription
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By Jeffrey Marsh
J. MIchael Bishop's How to Win the Nobel Prize An Unexpected Life In Science
Dr. Bishop calls his career "an unexpected life in science" because, unlike many scientists, he did not discover his vocation as a child. Born in 1936 in rural Pennsylvania, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he spent his elementary school years in a two-room schoolhouse, moved on to a small high school and then to Gettysburg College. When he graduated, he was still so naive that he wrote to Harvard Medical School and asked if he might visit the campus so he could see how it compared with his other option, the University of Pennsylvania.
This letter so amused the admissions office that they posted it on the bulletin board for all to see, but Dr. Bishop must have mightily impressed the Harvard medical faculty in other ways as well, because he was not only admitted, but allowed to follow his own path, spending his second year doing independent research and skipping most of the required fourth-year courses to study viruses.
After two years as a house physician at Mass. General Hospital, he left the practice of clinical medicine to pursue research at the National Institutes of Health, spent a year in Germany, and in 1968 returned to America to join the University of California at San Francisco, where he has been ever since. Shortly thereafter, Harold Varmus, another late developer who took up medicine after receiving a master's degree in English literature, arrived as a postdoctoral fellow, and the two began an exceptional scientific partnership that over the next 15 years turned UCSF into a powerhouse in molecular biology. | |
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