--Harvard's Next President: a candidate profile.

First in an occasional series. Today: Harold E. Varmus. Wednesday: Lawrence H. Summers

Picking up an honorary doctorate at Harvard in 1996 was just another award for Nobel Laureate Dr. Harold E. Varmus. But it was also a bit of a vindication: he was rejected from Harvard Medical School--twice.

Varmus received the degree as that year's Commencement speaker. Of all the Commencement speakers of recent years, Varmus was one of the least known to the Harvard community.

But since he won the 1989 Nobel Prize for his discovery of cancer-causing genes, Varmus--now the head Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital--has become an increasingly prominent figure in the scientific world.

The prize first catapulted him from a professor responsible for a couple dozen researchers to a supervisor of 13,000 scientists and policymakers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose pronouncements about scientific research were front-page news.

And now--even though he rejected Harvard for Amherst as an undergraduate--the Harvard Corporation is seriously considering Varmus for the University presidency.

The 1996 Commencement at which Varmus gave the keynote address wasn't his first at Harvard. As a kid from Freeport, Long Island he came up to Harvard for his father's 25th reunion. And in 1962 Varmus received a master's degree in English here before heading off to medical school at Columbia. (He had long thought that he wanted to become a doctor, though his intellectual interests drifted to philosophy and literature in college.)