J. Michael Bishop

John Michael Bishop (February 22, 1936 – March 20, 2026) was an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus. He was a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009. Bishop was born in York, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1936. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He later attended Harvard University Medical School, where he earned an MD in 1962. Bishop began his career working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He then spent a year working for the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany, before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, in 1968. Bishop remained on the school's faculty from 1968 on, and was chancellor of the university from 1998 to 2009. He was director of the Bishop Lab. He became the eighth chancellor of UCSF in 1998.