For work in cancer research, J. Michael Bishop shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Harold Varmus. He and Varmus found that cancer genes (oncogenes) could be derived from normal cell genes which had not been inherently cancer-causing, as was previously thought; they stopped normal functioning and became cancerous under certain conditions. Their discovery the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes set in motion a great amount of research on factors that govern the normal growth of cells.

John Michael Bishop was born February 22, 1936, to John and Carrie Grey Bishop. The family, which included another son and daughter, lived in York, Pennsylvania, where John Bishop was a Lutheran minister. Bishop's early schooling was almost entirely devoid of science. He entered Gettysburg College in 1953 as a premedical student and graduated with a chemistry degree in 1957. He attended Harvard Medical School but took several detours while he was there...