John Michael Bishop was an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus. Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1936, he studied at Gettysburg College and earned his medical degree at Harvard in 1962. After early work at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a year in Hamburg, he joined the University of California, San Francisco, in 1968 and stayed for the rest of his career. With Varmus he showed that a normal cellular gene, c-src, gave rise to the oncogene carried by the Rous sarcoma virus, which opened the way to finding many proto-oncogenes that can drive human cancers when mutated. He served as chancellor of UCSF from 1998 to 2009 and died in San Francisco in 2026.
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Source J. Michael Bishop (Wikipedia)Lead paragraphQuote, Lead paragraph
was an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
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1. J. Michael Bishop (Wikipedia)
Early life and education
Bishop was born in York, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1936.
Death
Bishop died from pneumonia in San Francisco on March 20, 2026, at the age of 90.
Lead paragraph
was an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
In Group: Molecular Biologists and Geneticists, Research
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
Specialist In: Oncology, Awards and honors
Their findings allowed the understanding of how malignant tumors are formed from changes to the normal genes of a cell.
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