Michael Bishop, a towering figure in cancer research, has passed away at the age of 90.
Bishop, the son of a Lutheran minister, grew up in rural Pennsylvania steeped in the pursuit of history and the love of music. After studying chemistry at Gettysburg College, Bishop attended Harvard Medical School, where he developed a passion for medical science. Following a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health where he studied virology, he moved to the University of California, San Francisco.
In the early 1970s, Bishop began a storied scientific collaboration with Harold Varmus. The discovery that made the Bishop-Varmus duo famous came several years into their partnership. The pair had decided to branch out from their studies of how Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), a retrovirus that infects chickens, replicates to explore how the virus causes cancer in these animals. At the time, “there was a large accumulation of hints that genetic malfunction might be involved in cancer, but there was really no solid evidence,” Bishop explained in an interview for an article on the Lasker website. Sequencing technology was not yet powerful enough to scour the large genomes of cancer cells for culprit genes, but it was easy to study the small genomes of cancer-causing viruses such as RSV in search of genetic culprits of cancer. “These viruses had handed these genes to us on a platter,” Bishop said.
Other research teams had recently figured out the gene in RSV responsible for its cancerous potency, which was dubbed src, but nobody knew where src came from. The Bishop-Varmus team was poised to answer that question because of their experience making probes that could recognize genes with similar sequences to a given gene of interest (in this case src). Using this approach, they found a version of RSV src in the genomes of birds and mammals, including humans. The finding provided them the foundation to show that src was an important cellular gene — they termed it a proto-oncogene — that could morph into a cancerous gene through mutations caused by insults to the cell.
Bishop was recognized with a 1982 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award “for the discovery that oncogenes are present in normal cells.” He later joined the Lasker Medical Research Awards Jury, where he served for 33 years, providing invaluable wisdom and guidance.
Listen to Michael Bishop discuss his work
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
