April 9, 2008 presentation by Nobel laureate Harold Varmus for the Stanford School of Medicine Medcast lecture series. Nobel laureate Harold Varmus discusses the intersection of cancer biology and cancer medicine. Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, earned his Nobel Prize for discovering retroviral oncogenes that can cause cancer. That work changed the way people thought about cancer: Rather than being a disease caused by environmental exposure, it could result from mutations in specific genes. Now, much cancer research and the search for therapeutics focus on genetic changes in cancer. Stanford University School of Medicine: med.stanford.edu Stanford University Channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com