Harold E. Varmus Quotes

22 quotes in 378 categories

• There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.
• I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the…
• The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude…
• Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at…
• As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.
• Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife…
• A major feature of life at the NIH in late 1960s was the extraordinary offering of evening courses for physicians attempting to become scientists as…
• From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might…
• I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided…
• When I was the NIH director, I often expressed envy of institute directors: they had the money and ran the scientific programmes.
• Cancer is a collection of many diseases with common principles, and each disease will have to be understood and more effectively controlled on its own…
• The NCI scientific programme leaders meet regularly to ensure that we are not ignoring highly original proposals and that we are not creating an unbalanced…
• All basic scientists who look to the NCI for funding should know that I will tolerate no retreat on the study of model systems and…
• Our biggest single theme is trying to make the NIH work better with the same amount of money.
• My ideal summer day was reading on the porch.
• Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought…
• I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.
• Tobacco, UV rays, viruses, heredity, and age are the main causes of cancer.
• Some growths can be detected early, making for increased accuracy in diagnosis. Some can be cured and others controlled.
• Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice.

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