TWO WIN NOBEL FOR CANCER RESEARCH

Author: By Dolores Kong, Contributing Reporter and Richard Saltus, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, October 10, 1989
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Bishop and Varmus, who both have longstanding ties to the Boston area, discovered that genes carried in normal cells could mutate and cause cancer. The finding is a major contribution to the current understanding of the disease, say scientists familiar with their work. These cancer-causing genes are called oncogenes.

"Their work on oncogenes is landmark in our progress against cancer," said Dr. Kurt J. Isselbacher, director of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was Bishop's clinical supervisor when he was a medical resident. "They were really among the first to show that there were specific genes" for cancer.

But Boston researchers familiar with Bishop's and Varmus' work were disappointed and surprised that a local scientist, Robert A. Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, was not included in the award.

"To my mind, Dr. Weinberg deserved to share the prize with them, for identifying the first human oncogene," said David Baltimore, director of the Whitehead Institute. "It sounds like the Nobel committee doesn't agree with me."

In a telephone interview from his weekend home in New Hampshire, Weinberg, often mentioned as a likely Nobel winner along with the San Francisco researchers, said the prizes to Bishop and Varmus were "very well deserved"
because "everything else in the field" was a result of their 1975 discovery.

Weinberg acknowledged his own important role in the development of the oncogene theory. His lab was the first to identify a mutation that turned a normal gene into a cancer-causing gene. However, he said, "Our own work flowed from theirs."

Bishop and Varmus, both professors of microbiology at the University of California, San Francisco, held a news conference yesterday morning. They will split the $469,000 that comes with the Nobel.

"The idea has been around for a long time that cancer is a genetic disease," Bishop said. "Some genes get damaged and cause cells to run amok. Genes from our cells can cause cancer cells if they're damaged. The seeds of cancer are in our genetic makeup."

Asked if their work had brought a cure for cancer closer, Bishop said, "We certainly have a better image of what's wrong with cancer cells than we did 10 years ago."

Bishop, 53, received his medical degree from Harvard and was a resident in medicine at Massachusetts General.

"He was one of our outstanding residents. We all recognized he was going to make an outstanding contribution some day," Isselbacher said.

Varmus, reached by telephone at 6:30 a.m. California time, said he had been up since about 3 a.m., when a radio reporter called him with the news.

"Any call at 3 in the morning is a surprise, but it's usually not a pleasant one," Varmus said.

"It's been known for a long time that cancer was in some sense a genetic disease. The importance of our findings is that one can identify explicitly the genes that play a role in cancer," Varmus said. As a result of their contribution, more than 50 different genes involved in cancer have been identified, he said.

At the news conference, Varmus said, "The basic idea that we helped establish is that cancer has its origins in genes that normally do us some good. But after they become abnormal through mutation, they cause a role in cancer."

Varmus, 49, received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and a master's degree in English from Harvard, before getting his medical degree
from Columbia University.

Last year he spent some time doing research at Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, when his wife, Constance Casey, a book critic/columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, was serving as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Varmus said he was "certainly disappointed" that Weinberg didn't share the prize with them. "It wasn't us alone. The communities of scientists who are working on this have certainly changed the landscape."

When asked how he was going to celebrate, Varmus, an avid baseball fan, said, "I'm hoping to watch a victorious Giants game." He got four free tickets from the San Francisco Examiner to see yesterday's National League playoff game between the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs.

Meanwhile, in France, a researcher who worked for Bishop and Varmus said he did the work on their project and should have shared in the award.

"I am very disappointed," said Dr. Dominique Stehelin, a director of research for the National Center for Scientific Research at the Pasteur Institute in Lille. "I find all that very unfair and rotten."

"I did the work all by myself, from A to Z," Stehelin told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.

KONG ;10/09 CORCOR;10/11,15:39 NOBEL10