John Michael Bishop (born February 22, 1936) is an American immunologist and

microbiologist A microbiologist (from Ancient Greek, Greek ) is a scientist who studies microscopic life forms and processes. This includes study of the growth, interactions and characteristics of Microorganism, microscopic organisms such as bacteria, algae, f ...

who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984

Alfred P. Sloan Prize The Alfred P. Sloan Prize is an award given each year, starting in 2003, to a film at the Sundance Film Festival. The prize is given to a feature film that focuses on science or technology as a theme, or depicts a scientist, engineer, or mathemat ...

. He serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco ( UCSF), where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.Autobiography on UCSF Website

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Education and early life

Bishop was born in Pennsylvania. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He later attended Harvard University, where he earned an MD in 1962.

Career

Bishop began his career working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He then spent a year working for the

Heinrich Pette Institute The Leibniz Institute of Virology was founded in 1948 by Heinrich Pette, a German neurologist. It began as a research facility to create a Poliomyelitis, polio vaccine. It is now a private foundation and involved with basic research in virology an ...

in Hamburg, Germany before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. Bishop has remained on the school's faculty since 1968, and was chancellor of the university from 1998 to 2009. He is director of the Bishop Lab. He became the eighth chancellor of UCSF in 1998. He oversaw one of UCSF's major transition and growth periods, including the expanding Mission Bay development and philanthropic support recruitment. During his tenure, he unveiled the first comprehensive, campus-wide, strategic plan to promote diversity and foster a supportive work environment. During this time, UCSF also adopted a new mission: ''advancing health worldwide''™.

Research

Much of this work was conducted jointly with Harold Varmus in a notably long scientific partnership. Their best-known accomplishment was the identification of a cellular gene (c-src) that gave rise to the v-src oncogene of Rous Sarcoma Virus, a cancer-causing virus first isolated from a chicken sarcoma by

Peyton Rous Francis Peyton Rous () (October 5, 1879 – February 16, 1970) was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller University known for his works in oncoviruses, blood transfusion and physiology of digestion. A medical graduate from the Johns Hopki ...

in 1910. Their discovery triggered the identification of many other cellular proto-oncogenes—progenitors of viral oncogenes and targets for mutations that drive human cancers.

Awards and honors

Bishop is best known for his Nobel-winning work on retroviral oncogenes. Working with Harold E. Varmus in the 1980s, he discovered the first human oncogene, c-Src. Their findings allowed the understanding of how malignant tumors are formed from changes to the normal genes of a cell. These changes can be produced by viruses, by radiation, or by exposure to some chemicals. Bishop is a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Bishop is also a recipient of National Medal of Science in 2003. That same year, his book "How to win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science" was published. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2008. In 2020, Bishop received from the UC Berkeley Academic Senate the

Clark Kerr Award The Clark Kerr Award, fully the Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education or the Clark Kerr Medal is an award given to a person who has made "an extraordinary and distinguished contribution to the advancement of higher edu ...

for distinguished leadership in higher education.

Archival collections

The University of California, San Francisco Archives and Special Collections houses a collection of J. Michael Bishop papers, including his laboratory research notebooks, writings, photographs, and other material.Calisphere J. Michael Bishop Collection: https://calisphere.org/collections/26395/

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bishop, J. Michael 21st-century American biologists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences American immunologists American microbiologists American Nobel laureates American virologists Gettysburg College alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine National Medal of Science laureates University of California, San Francisco faculty 1936 births Living people People from York, Pennsylvania Foreign Members of the Royal Society Recipients of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research Members of the American Philosophical Society Members of the National Academy of Medicine