11 THE WRITING LIFE BY HAROLD VARMUS
The chemistry of a good story W
hen high school students ask to spend their after- noons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn’t develop that kind of
enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old. In the 1950s, in my Long Island public high school, science courses were at best uninspiring; it would never have occurred to me to sacrifice after-school hours to a laboratory. But as the son of a family physician and a psychiatric social worker, I assumed I was destined for a medical career, so I was dili- gent in those classes, even though I preferred novels to chemistry and tennis to science fairs. Later, at Amherst College, my
exposure to science was dutiful, pre-ordained by an inflexible curriculum and pre-med requirements. My pleasures came instead from Chaucer, Milton, Dickens and college journalism. After college, finally acknowledging what I enjoyed, I entered graduate school in English literature, heading toward a scholarly career that would emphasize the 17th century. Then disenchantment with Harvard
graduate school and anxiety that I was ir- reversibly detaching myself from the
Harold Varmus presents
his book in the Contemporary Life pavilion at 4:25 p.m.
modern world sent me to medical school at Columbia. I had learned of Gertrude Stein’s bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical dis- ease specialist or academic internist. 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 to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service. Despite my lack of scientific credentials, I was able to secure a training po- sition in the laboratory of Ira Pastan, a young physician-scien- tist at the National Institutes of Health. There, for the first time in a lengthy education, I learned the joys of science. I was asked to
attack an important unsolved problem (how cyclic AMP, a chemical mediator of cell action, controls gene activity). I de- vised an accurate test that convincingly answered the question. Then I told other scientists about my pretty findings, wrote papers for publication, received praise and contemplated the next experiments. I had learned that science is a reward-
ing, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had dis-
Harold Varmus: A Dickensian in the lab The scientist of old cliché is a solitary, driven soul, laboring in isolation, far from the
madding crowd. But human progress, as Galileo knew, is better served by a scientist who can walk the halls of power and spur the curiosity of a king. Few understand Galileo’s in- stinct as well as Harold Varmus, who, as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993-99, won Congress’s attention, doubled the NIH’s operating budget, and stimulated unparalleled growth. Like Galileo, he knows what it takes to kindle science. He grew up thinking he would be a writer. Born in Oceanside, N.Y., and raised in Free-
port, he was a bookish child. His mother was a psychiatric social worker, his father “a Mar- cus Welby type” family doctor. Both were children of immigrants: she, of Austrian roots; he from a family of Poles. Educated at Wellesley and Harvard, they were “enlightened read- ers, although not particularly passionate about books.” The boy found inspiration at his lo- cal library, “which, in time, became my second home.” At school, teachers told him he had a way with words, the praise so convincing that he decided he had a future in English. “My ideal summer day,” he says, “was reading on the porch.” At first, the books were biographies of explorers, composers, scientists. By high school, they were “Gone With the Wind,” “David Copperfield.” At Amherst, he became in- terested in Victorian novelists. At Harvard graduate school, he did an M.A. thesis on how real life intruded in Dickens’s work. But somewhere between a stint in a missionary hospi- tal in India and his opposition to the Vietnam War, he chose medicine. The rest of Varmus’s life is on the record: He worked with J. Michael Bishop at the Uni- versity of California at San Francisco and earned a Nobel Prize for research on genes that cause cancer. After heading the NIH, he went on to become president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Last year, he published “The Art and Politics of Science.” Just this July, President Obama named him director of the National Cancer Institute. And yet in his spare time — when he isn’t bicycling from Cleveland Park, where he lives, to Bethesda, where he works — he reads Richard Holmes, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen. Science, like fiction, Varmus says, “is full of ferment and drama.” The theories that strive to explain how cells become cancerous are highly competitive, as pitted against one another as life and death. If Galileo were alive today, he would understand Varmus’s point. Exactly 400 years ago, Galileo dared to say that the sun was at the center of the universe. Just weeks ago, Varmus began his NCI tenure by saying that gene-based thera- pies may be the way to treat cancer. Science and literature do have a way of making you turn the page.
—Marie Arana
aranam@washpost.com
covered. It was so exhilarating that I de- cided to abandon medicine and pursue a scientific career, studying viruses that cause cancer in animals. This precipitated a move to San Francisco, a long-term alli- ance with a like-minded young scientist (J. Michael Bishop), and the gradual mo- bilization of a team to figure out how those viruses multiply, how they cause tu- mors in animals, and what they can teach us about human cancer. I have pursued these questions (and other questions that the answers prompt- ed) — working initially at a laboratory bench with my own hands and, increas- ingly over time, overseeing experiments done by others — for almost 40 years. But until a few years ago, I could not have imagined myself writing a book for a gen- eral audience about my life as a scientist. I thought that the routines of a medical sci- entist in a laboratory — unlike the peripa- tetic, glamorous and even dangerous ex- ploits of, say, an Amazonian ornithologist — would seem physically dull and intel- lectually impenetrable. I didn’t realize that we had stories about discovery — about the logic and excitement of science and about the people who did it — that could be told and were worth telling. Moreover, I was wary of being personal on paper, of getting away from the secure data and cautious interpretations that are the reliable tools of those writing for sci- entific journals. But suddenly, in 2004, I found myself
obliged to write that book anyway. I had been asked to deliver a series of three weekly lectures at the New York Public Li- brary. The offer was seductive: a familiar and limited format (50-minute lectures, with slides), an interested but non-tech- nical audience, a prestigious venue and an impressive title: the Norton Lectures. Sponsorship by a publisher meant that the lectures would eventually be turned into a book. The imperative to connect with a lay audience on three fall evenings seemed daunting, but I settled on three narrative lines that seemed interesting, one for each lecture. In the first, I would recount my meanderings as an adolescent and a young adult through literature and medi- cine toward science. In the second, I would outline our experiments with can- cer viruses that unveiled genes now impli- cated in human cancer and describe how those genes are used as targets for novel therapies. In the third, I would describe my unexpected foray into public policy af- ter President Bill Clinton chose me, de- spite my lack of administrative experi- ence, to become the director of the Na- tional Institutes of Health in 1993. This final lecture would allow me to speak, al- beit briefly, about several matters of inter- est to both scientists and the general pub- lic: how the government funds science, how a large federal agency works with Congress, how the NIH oversees contro- versial research (for instance, on stem cells or embryos), how scientific work is published, and how science and health can be promoted globally.
HAROLD VARMUS / PHOTO BYNATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
Turning these lectures into a book was a more complicated business than con- ceiving and delivering them. The task of becoming a different kind of writer took almost four years. Once the constraints of a 50-minute lecture were removed, I be- came aware of a new and intimidating freedom — in principle, I could go on as long as I wanted! Moreover, I needed to learn to write in a new way, a way that es- tablished relationships with readers, en- couraged humor, commanded a reader’s sustained attention, and exposed an au- thor’s feelings and personality. It was not enough to summarize our
major findings about cancer viruses and cancer genes or their recent applications to patient care. I wanted to describe how and when ideas popped into my head (for instance, while wheeling our infant son around an English churchyard). I tried to see a pattern to my experimental failures (such as when I committed the sin of Thinking Too Much and advised my train- ees to take what proved to be the harder and slower routes to answers). Because I have benefited enormously from scientific collaborations, I also sought to show how our students and colleagues at other insti- tutions helped to make discoveries and how I entered — and many years later left — an unusually long and productive part- nership. None of this could have been done in 50 minutes at a podium or with- out a newly liberated attitude toward my role as a writer.
If I could describe my writing experi- ence as a kind of science, the lectures were the pilot experiments, and the book was the full analysis. But I can also see a story emerge: As an author, I discovered things about myself and was changed in the process. Perhaps, after all, I still prefer novels to chemistry.
THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010
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