Newly appointed Nobel laureates traditionally give speeches after the banquet held in their honour. In 1989 Harold Varmus, having just received the medicine prize, used his to recall similar Scandinavian revels described in the epic poem "Beowulf", and to compare his research subject, cancer, to the beast Grendel: a distorted version of our normal selves. Having started out as a graduate student in English literature, his straddling of the worlds of art and science was natural. In the years to follow, he was to go further, encompassing the world of American politics too.
展开▼
