Interview with the 1989 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Harold E. Varmus, March 2009. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

Harold Varmus describes his broad education at Amherst College and his transition from a masters in English Literature to a medical degree from Columbia University, his shift to laboratory science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and his subsequent research on cancer at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco (13:11). He then discusses his ten year collaborative partnership with Mike Bishop (17:35), his Nobel Banquet Speech (23:45), his directorship of the NIH (26:07), his current role as a political advisor on science to Barack Obama (39:34), his commitment to the ‘open-access publishing movement’ (43:07), and his hope to create a Global Science Corp (50:53).