cover of episode Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus: Cancer biology and the future of cancer research

Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus: Cancer biology and the future of cancer research

2022/4/27
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“It's critical that the general public understand that science is a long process, and that science is a process that often begins with the art of the feasible. […] We wouldn't be anywhere without computers, we wouldn't be anywhere without DNA sequencing methods. That not only gives me confidence, but it also makes me feel that there's an awful lot left to do.”

In this week’s episode of The G Word, our Chief Ecosystems and Partnership Officer Parker Moss is joined by Harold Varmus, who was previously the director of the National Institute of Health and of the National Cancer Institute and is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He also won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes with J. Michael Bishop.

Today they discuss cancer biology, the future of cancer research and the major questions that studying diverse ethnicities will uncover through genomics. Harold and Parker also discussed some of the big challenges of bringing molecular diagnostics and genomics into lower income countries and the technologies that are continuing to help explore functional genomics in cancer.