One Nobel Laureate's View of Journal Impact Factors. (November 22, 2010)

Harold Varmus was the co-recipient (along with J. Michael Bishop) of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. From 1993 to 1999, he served as Director of the National Institutes of Health during which period its budget nearly doubled, and from January, 2000 - 2010, he served as President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In May this year he was asked by President Obama to return to the NIH this time as director of the National Cancer Institute. He took up the directorship in July.

He served as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from April 2009 until he took up the directorship of NCI.

In his 2009 book The Art and Politics of Science Dr Varmus had this to say with regard to "a minor industry sometimes called bibliometrics. The most famous (or infamous) of its indicators, the 'impact factor'..."