An expert in several fields of medical research, Harold Eliot Varmus (born 1939) became director of the National Institutes of Health in 1993.

Harold Eliot Varmus, a medical doctor, was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. Part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH, located in Bethesda, Maryland, is made up of several individual institutes; for example, Aging, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Cancer, Child Health and Human Development, Environmental Health Science, and Drug Abuse.

On Varmus's nomination as director, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala issued the following statement: "We are delighted that Dr. Varmus will be our new NIH director--the first NIH director to have won a Nobel Prize--because he is one of the world's most eminent and most honored biomedical scientists. He has been working at the cutting edge of modern cell and molecular...