John Michael Bishop American immunologist and microbiologist Date of Birth: 22.02.1936 Country: USA

1. Early Life and Education
2. Medical and Research Career
3. Research on Retroviruses
4. The Discovery of Oncogenes
5. Nobel Prize Recognition

Early Life and Education

John Michael Bishop was born on February 22, 1936, in York, Pennsylvania, to a Lutheran minister. He attended a small country school and later a provincial high school. Influenced by his family doctor, Robert Kauff, Bishop developed a passion for human biology.

Aspiring to become a physician, Bishop first attended Gettysburg College and then pursued medical studies at Harvard University. It was at Harvard that his interest in animal viruses blossomed.

Medical and Research Career

After graduating from medical school, Bishop served as a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital for two years. He then commenced a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he focused on poliovirus replication. Following a one-year research stay in Hamburg, he joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco.

Research on Retroviruses

Initially drawn to molecular biology, Bishop was initially unable to pursue it directly due to lack of training. Instead, he chose a research niche that intersected with fundamental molecular biology: viruses. Specifically, he began studying the replication of the sarcoma virus.

Coinciding with the discovery of reverse transcriptase, a key enzyme in retroviruses, Bishop elucidated the mechanism by which RNA was copied into DNA. He also characterized the viral RNA within infected cells.

The Discovery of Oncogenes

In the late 1970s, Bishop and Harold Varmus investigated how the sarcoma virus transformed infected cells into cancerous ones. They found that the viral gene responsible for tumor formation, known as src (for sarcoma), had been captured from a normal cellular gene (a proto-oncogene) during the viral transduction process.

Nobel Prize Recognition

Bishop and Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking research on oncogenes. Their discovery significantly contributed to our understanding of cancer development.