Prof. Harold Varmus, the 1989 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology/Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes, visited the Nencki Institute on September 22^nd, 2025. Prof. Varmus served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; 1993-1999), was the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City (2000-2010) and the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the NIH (2010-2015). Since 2015 he is the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, Meyer Cancer Center. Also, he is a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, and has served as the advisor to President Barack Obama and to many institutions and organizations, including World Health Organization.

He was accompanied by Prof. Aleksander Włodawer, a head of a protein crystallography laboratory at the NCI, NIH, and a foreign member of Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS). Noticeably, his ties with the Nencki Institute date from his childhood as his mother, late Prof. Paulina Włodawer by 1969 was running the Laboratory of Lipid Biochemistry at our Institute.

After a brief meeting with the Prof. Monika Liguz-Lęcznar and Prof. Krzysztof Nieznański, Deputy Directors for Scientific Matters, both Guests visited the laboratory of Prof. Grzegorz Sumara, the Dioscuri Center Program awardee.

The main point of the visit was an informal meeting of Prof. Varmus with the Nencki Institute community, during which the scientists who were on postdoctoral training at the NIH (NIH Alumni) shared their memories on the stay there and how it affected their professional careers after coming back to Poland. The NIH Alumni who participated in the meeting were: from the Nencki Institute - Prof. Urszula Wojda, Prof. Joanna Szczepanowska and Prof. Jolanta Rędowicz, Prof. Małgorzata Łobocka and Prof. Justyna McIntyre from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics (IBB), PAS; Prof. Monika Puzianowska-Kuźnicka from the Mossakowski Institute of Experimental Medicine, PAS, Prof. Marta Koblowska from the University of Warsaw/IBB as well as Prof. Marcin Nowotny (former PhD student at the Nencki Institute) from the International Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology. The participants had the opportunity to ask Prof. Varmus about his path to become the Noble Prize Winner and discuss the current policy on science in the USA and Poland. The meeting was followed by a lunch during which the meeting participants had a chance for further informal discussions with the distinguished Guest.