John Michael Bishop

John Michael Bishop (York, Pennsylvania, United States, February 22, 1936) is an American biologist and microbiologist, an expert in immunology. He began working in the Cell Biology section of the National Institutes of Health in Betsheda, Maryland. He spends a year of research at the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany. In 1968 he joined the San Francisco School of Medicine, where he continued to work with Harold Elliot Varmus.

Bishop and Varmus discovered the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes in the 1980s. With his findings, it was possible to understand the production of malignant tumors from changes that occur in normal genes of a cell, which are not only produced by viruses but can also be produced by radiation, chemical substances, etc.

Bishop and Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989.

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 in Hamburg Germany before joining the faculty of the University of California (USCF), San Francisco in 1968. Bishop has remained on the faculty of the school since 1968, and was provost of the university from 1998 to 2009. He is director of the Bishop Lab.

He became UCSF's eighth chancellor in 1998. He oversaw one of UCSF's major periods of transition and growth, including the expanding development of Mission Bay and the recruitment of philanthropic support. 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 embraced a new mission: Advancing Health Around the World™.

Research

Much of this work was carried out in conjunction with Harold Varmus in a remarkably long scientific partnership. His best-known achievement was the identification of a cellular gene (c-src) that gave rise to the v-src oncogene of Rous sarcoma virus, a cancer virus that Peyton Rous first isolated from a chicken breast sarcoma. in 1911. Their discovery led to the identification of many other cellular proto-oncogenes, progenitors of viral oncogenes, and targets of mutations that cause human cancers.