For work in cancer research, J. Michael Bishop shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Harold Varmus. Bishop 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. In presenting the Nobel Prize, Erling Norrby of the Karolinska Institute praised the pair for their discovery of "the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes," and claimed they had "set in motion an avalanche of research on factors that govern the normal growth of cells."

John Michael Bishop was born in Pennsylvania 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, and even when he entered Gettysburg College in 1953 as...