J. Michael Bishop Papers Online

We are pleased to announce that the J. Michael Bishop Papers digital collection is now available publicly on Calisphere.org. Bishop is a Nobel Prize-winning researcher and UCSF Chancellor Emeritus. The digital collection features hundreds of pages of material and photographs selected from Bishop’s papers housed in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (MSS 2007-21).

J. Michael Bishop college portrait, Gettysburg College, circa 1955. MSS 2007-21, box 1, folder 4.

J. Michael Bishop college portrait, Gettysburg College, circa 1955. MSS 2007-21, box 1, folder 4.

J. Michael Bishop portrait with molecular model, circa 2000. MSS 2007-21, case D, folder 1.

J. Michael Bishop portrait with molecular model, circa 2000. MSS 2007-21, case D, folder 1.

J. Michael Bishop, MD, joined the UCSF faculty in 1968. He was appointed director of the GW Hooper Research Foundation in 1981 and named UCSF Chancellor in 1998, a post he held until 2009. He continues to serve as Hooper’s director and as professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

 J. Michael Bishop email to Harold Varmus regarding Bishop's University of California, San Francisco Chancellor appointment, 1998-02-06. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 43.

J. Michael Bishop email to Harold Varmus regarding Bishop’s University of California, San Francisco Chancellor appointment, 1998-02-06. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 43.

In 1989, Bishop and his research partner, Harold Varmus, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in cancer research. Bishop and Varmus discovered the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Their work helped clarify the processes that convert normal cellular genes into cancer genes and impacted our understanding of the genesis of human cancer.

J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at Nobel Shindig, a county-western themed dinner party given by Varmus and Bishop in celebration of their Nobel Prize award in Physiology or Medicine; held at DeMarco's 23 Club, Brisbane, California, 1989. MSS 2007-21, carton 8, folder 41.

J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at Nobel Shindig, a county-western themed dinner party given by Varmus and Bishop in celebration of their Nobel Prize award; held at DeMarco’s 23 Club, Brisbane, California, 1989. MSS 2007-21, carton 8, folder 41.

The digital collection features selections from Bishop’s laboratory research notebooks and professional papers, including article drafts, correspondence with other scientists, and teaching and lecture material. Also included are photographs and draft figures created by Bishop for his publications.

Purification of Annealed Product Gd RNA graphs. Selected page from a laboratory research binder of J. Michael Bishop, circa 1970. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 3.

Purification of Annealed Product Gd RNA graphs. Selected page from a laboratory research binder of J. Michael Bishop, circa 1970. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 3.

The Life Cycle of Rous Sarcoma Virus diagram drawing (1) by J. Michael Bishop; created for Bishop's article "Oncogenes" published in Scientific American, 1982. mss200721_2_2_sciamerican1.

The Life Cycle of Rous Sarcoma Virus diagram drawing (1) by J. Michael Bishop; created for Bishop’s article “Oncogenes” published in Scientific American, 1982. MSS 2007-21, carton 2, folder 2.

You can view the digital collection on Calisphere.org. If you would like to visit the UCSF Archives and work with the complete physical collection, please check out the detailed inventory available on the Online Archive of California and make an appointment with us.

Collections in the Media

We’re proud to tell you about two new documentaries that used material from our collections and are hitting screens big and small near you.

Ken Burns’ new 3-part documentary, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, premieres on PBS tonight, March 30. The film “examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective and a biographer’s passion. The series artfully weaves three different films in one: a riveting historical documentary; an engrossing and intimate vérité film; and a scientific and investigative report.” It’s based on the book written by physician and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee and published in 2010, described as a “biography of cancer.”

[Note for UCSF Library fans: Mukherjee is married to Sarah Sze, the artist who created the mirror polished stainless steel sculpture in the front stairwell of the Parnassus library.]

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/MDsqTGJ9lYo” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

 

The film Merchants of Doubt, by the filmmakers of Food, Inc., is now playing in theaters in San Francisco (and elsewhere). It’s “the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.” The team was on-site for several days, interviewing UCSF Professor Stan Glantz in our reading room and filming in the vault.

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/j8ii9zGFDtc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

 

Let us know if you’re able to see either film! What did you think?

And, of course, contact us anytime via our online contact form to submit a question or comment. You can also email us directly at libraryarchives@ucsf.edu.

Archives Lecture Series: Early Interdisciplinary Cancer Research at UCSF, October 13th, 2014

Join us on Monday, October 13th as M. Michael Thaler, M.D., M.A. (Hist.) gives a lecture in a series launched by UCSF Archives & Special Collections.

Date: Monday, October 13th, 2014
Time: 12 pm-1:20 pm
Location: Lange Room, UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus, 5th floor
This lecture is free and open to the public.
Please RSVP to reserve a seat.

Shimkin’s “Lost Colony” (1947-1953): Early Interdisciplinary Cancer Research at UCSF

Michael B. Shimkin

Michael B. Shimkin, Director of the Laboratory of Experimental Oncology at UCSF, 1947-1953

The Laboratory of Experimental Oncology (LEO) was established in 1947 at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco as a “colony” of the National Institutes of Health, to be jointly administered by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and UCSF. The LEO was the brain child of Michael B. Shimkin, a career U.S.P.H.S. physician and cancer researcher at the NCI. Shimkin was a native San Franciscan, having successively graduated from Lowell High School, UC Berkeley and UCSF. After 8 years at the NCI and war service, Shimkin returned to his native city and alma mater as ideal environments for a “combined” interdisciplinary clinical and basic research unit embedded in a medical school and staffed by full-time research teams of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s. These unprecedented ideas directly challenged the traditional separation between patient care and laboratory research. Shimkin introduced a ‘release’ form that fully informed patients with terminal cancer admitted to the LEO about the incurable nature of their illness, and clearly distinguished between therapeutic and experimental procedures. This prototypical “informed consent” approach met with mounting resistance from the clinical faculty. In response, Shimkin organized a symposium at UCSF in October 1951 on the subject on human experimentation. In his presentation, Shimkin became the first American physician to draw on the injunctions from the recently concluded Nuremberg trials against German physicians who had conducted medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps, as a source of universal guidelines for the ethical conduct of experiments with human subjects. The LEO treated 500 patients and generated over 130 publications before being replaced by the Moffitt-based Cancer Research Institute in 1953.

About M. Michael Thaler

M. Michael Thaler, M.D., M.A. (Hist.)

M. Michael Thaler, M.D., M.A. (Hist.)

Michael Thaler received his M.D. from the University of Toronto, trained in pediatrics, pediatric pathology and internal medicine, and completed research fellowships in cell biology at Washington University and in developmental biology at Harvard University. As professor of pediatrics at UCSF, he established the first academic division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition in North America, was awarded the first NIH Research Career Development Award in Pediatric Gastroenterology, and was P.I. of the foundational NIH Research Training Program grant in Pediatric Gastroenterology. He also directed the Laboratory of Pediatric Hepatology and served as associate director of the UCSF Liver Center.  His publications include approximately 200 clinical and basic research articles on perinatal bilirubin metabolism, infantile cholestasis syndromes, Reye’s syndrome, and bile salt metabolism. As professor emeritus, he earned a M.A. degree in History of Health Sciences at UCSF in 1998, and received appointments as Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Bioethics, and Research Associate at the Stanford Center for History and Philosophy of Science.  For the next 12 years, he taught undergraduate courses on the history of medical sciences as Visiting Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. He continues to lecture at the Osher Life Long Learning Institute in Berkeley, and for the fellowship program in Pediatric Gastroenterology at UCSF.  His awards include the UCSF Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Public Service and the Shwachman Lifetime Achievement Award in Pediatric Gastroenterology. He presently serves as president of   the UCSF Emeriti Faculty Association.

About the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series

UCSF Archives & Special Collections launched this lecture series to introduce a wider community to treasures and collections from its holdings, to provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss how they use this material, and to celebrate clinicians, scientists, and health care professionals who donated their papers to the archives.