Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

Baruch Samuel "Barry" Blumberg was an American doctor and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on kuru, the... first human prion disease demonstrated to be infectious, and the President of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death. Blumberg received the Nobel Prize for "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Blumberg identified the Hepatitis B virus, and later developed its diagnostic test and vaccine. Blumberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. He first attended the Orthodox Yeshiva of Flatbush for elementary school, where he learned to read and write in Hebrew and to study the Bible and Jewish texts in their original language. Blumberg then attended Far Rockaway High School in the early 1940s, a school that also produced fellow laureates Burton Richter and Richard Feynman. Blumberg served as a U.S. Navy deck officer during World War II.
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Harold Elliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the 14th and current Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post he was... appointed to by President Barack Obama. He was a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He also serves as one of three co-Chairs of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Varmus was born to Jewish parents of Eastern European descent in Oceanside, New York. In 1957, he enrolled at Amherst College, intending to follow in his father's footsteps as a medical doctor, but eventually graduating with a B.A. in English literature. He went on to earn a graduate degree in English at Harvard University in 1962 before changing his mind once again and applying to medical schools. He got rejected from Harvard Medical School twice. That same year, he entered the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India and the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.
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Harold Elliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and the 14th and current Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post he was... appointed to by President Barack Obama. He was a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He also serves as one of three co-Chairs of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Varmus was born to Jewish parents of Eastern European descent in Oceanside, New York. In 1957, he enrolled at Amherst College, intending to follow in his father's footsteps as a medical doctor, but eventually graduating with a B.A. in English literature. He went on to earn a graduate degree in English at Harvard University in 1962 before changing his mind once again and applying to medical schools. He got rejected from Harvard Medical School twice. That same year, he entered the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India and the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.
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Eric Richard Kandel is an American neuropsychiatrist who was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the... physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. Kandel, who had studied psychoanalysis, wanted to understand how memory works. His mentor, Harry Grundfest, said, “If you want to understand the brain you’re going to have to take a reductionist approach, one cell at a time.” So he studied the neural system of a simple animal, Aplysia, a snail with very large nerve cells. Kandel is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia. Kandel authored In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind , which chronicles his life and research. The book was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology.
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