Who

Varmus is the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where he courts donors, runs his own research lab, and oversees the hospital's extensive expansion projects.

Backstory

The son of a physician and a social worker, Varmus was raised on Long Island and edited the student newspaper at Amherst, before attending medical school at Columbia having been rejected from Harvard Medical School twice. Following a stint at a hospital in India, Varmus returned to the U.S. to pursue a career in research, taking a position at the National Institutes of Health. In 1970 he moved to UC-San Francisco, where he became a full professor in 1979 and earned international fame a decade later, winning the 1989 Nobel Prize for medicine for his research into the genetic basis of cancer. In 1993, President Bill Clinton tapped him to head up the NIH; during his seven-year stint in charge of more than 13,000 scientists, Varmus championed the development of the electronic research archive PubMed and proved himself a savvy political networker, lobbying the federal government to nearly double the agency's budget. He left the NIH to join Sloan-Kettering in 2000, replacing Dr. Paul Marks.

Of note

Since taking over the country's premier cancer hospital, Varmus has sought to uphold MSK's reputation as a research powerhouse by creating new programs, hiring additional staff—more than 10,000 people work at the institution—and, of course, raising more money. In conjunction with Paul Nurse of Rockefeller University and Tony Gotto of Weill Cornell, Varmus landed a $50 million donation in 2005 from Hank Greenberg's Starr Foundation, which is funding stem cell research and graduate training programs in chemical biology and computational biology; a donation by Ralph Lauren allowed MSK to open a cancer center in Harlem in 2003. But in 2006 Varmus landed his single biggest donation when real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman agreed to donate $100 million to MSK. The largest gift in the hospital's history—Zuckerman's daughter, Abigail, was once a patient there—means that Varmus is now overseeing its biggest expansion yet: a 23-story, 693,000 square-foot facility on East 68th Street.

Keeping score

Varmus earns $2.2 million a year as president of MSK.

Namedrop

Sloan-Kettering's board members include Louis Gerstner, Mort Zuckerman, Marie-Josée Kravis, Steve Forbes, Roland Betts, Bruce Ratner, David Koch, and Evelyn Lauder, who has been one of the hospital's most active fundraisers for more than a decade.

Off hours

Varmus is an avid cyclist. He's worked the New York Marathon as a volunteer, escorting wheelchair cyclists through the 26-mile course. He's also on the advisory board of Paul White's Transportation Alternatives, the non-profit that advocates bicycling and has been a leading voice for reducing car use in the city.

Personal

The rumpled scientist is married to Constance Casey; they met while she was a reporter at Congressional Quarterly in the '60s. They have two grown sons, Jacob and Chris, and live on the Upper East Side. They also bought a home in Old Chatham, New York for $800,000 in 2004.

No joke

Despite the fact he's a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Varmus seems to have spare time to watch movies and TV shows. He's written several reviews for the New York Times, including a piece on Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later—"it's official: microbial plagues have displaced nuclear winter in the public's mind as the way the world will end"—and a review of the short-lived NBC medical science series, Medical Investigation.