After Columbia, Varmus bounced around different research jobs for a couple of years before landing in J. Michael Bishop's lab at the University of California at San Francisco in 1969. It was their collaborative work on the genetic basis of cancer that led to the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (Bishop, who is now a Harvard Overseer, declined through his spokesperson to comment on a potential conflict of interest in voting to confirm his closest collaborator, which would happen if the Harvard Corporation recommended Varmus for the presidency.)

It was Varmus's wife, journalist and book reviewer Constance L. Casey, who brought him back to Cambridge after almost 30 years as a professor in San Francisco. While she spent a year at Harvard as Nieman fellow in 1988-1989, the Varmuses rented a house on Francis Avenue, prime real estate just a block away from the University.

It was on Francis Avenue, less than a block away from Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and from Afro- American Studies Department Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. that Varmus built much of the Harvard political capital he has now.

At least one of his neighbors, literary scholar Justin Kaplan '45, wrote a letter to presidential search committee chair Robert G. Stone Jr. '45 explaining why Varmus is well suited for the presidency. Another, Lecturer in Public Policy Dorothy Zinberg, has a similar letter in the works.

"He's a really extraordinary personality," said novelist Anne Bernays, who is married to Kaplan. "You want to stand near him to see what he's going to say."

While in Cambridge, Varmus worked in the cancer research laboratory of Robert Weindruck at the Whitehead Institute, an independent research laboratory that is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many members of the scientific community were excited when Varmus was chosen for the NIH post, but worried about his inexperience in administrative matters.