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

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

who shared the 1989

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine () is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, acco ...

with

Harold E. Varmus Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He was ...

. He serves as an active faculty member at the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedic ...

(

UCSF The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life ...

), where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.Autobiography on UCSF Website

/ref>National Medal of Science details
/ref>

Education and early life

Bishop was born in

York, Pennsylvania York is a city in York County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. Located in South Central Pennsylvania, the city's population was 44,800 at the time of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities in ...

. He attended

Gettysburg College Gettysburg College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1832, the campus is adjacent to the Gettysburg Battlefield. Gettysburg College has about ...

as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of

Lambda Chi Alpha Lambda Chi Alpha (), commonly referred to as Lambda Chi, is a fraternities and sororities, collegiate fraternity in North America. With over 300,000 initiates as of 2024, it is the third-largest social fraternity in the world by number of initia ...

fraternity. He later attended

Harvard University Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is the third oldest medical school in the United States. It provides patient ca ...

, where he earned an MD in 1962.

Career

Bishop began his career working for the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, ) is one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. NIAID's mis ...

, a part of the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

. 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 polio vaccine. It is now a private foundation and involved with basic research in virology and the immune r ...

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

before joining the faculty of the

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 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 A retrovirus is a type of virus that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. After invading a host cell's cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase e ...

oncogenes An oncogene is a gene that has the potential to cause cancer. In tumor cells, these genes are often mutated, or expressed at high levels.

. Working with

in the 1980s, he discovered the first human oncogene, c-Src. Their findings allowed the understanding of how malignant

tumor A neoplasm () is a type of abnormal and excessive growth of tissue. The process that occurs to form or produce a neoplasm is called neoplasia. The growth of a neoplasm is uncoordinated with that of the normal surrounding tissue, and persists ...

s are formed from changes to the normal

gene In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protei ...

s of a

cell Cell most often refers to: * Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life * Cellphone, a phone connected to a cellular network * Clandestine cell, a penetration-resistant form of a secret or outlawed organization * Electrochemical cell, a de ...

. 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, NGO, 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 ...

, the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

, and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

. Bishop is also a recipient of

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral science, behavior ...

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 The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

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