Detroit, Mich. - The Wayne State University Academy of Scholars awarded its second Thomas N. Bonner Award to J. Michael Bishop, chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, for his book, How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

In the spirit of Bonner's career as an educator, university president and renowned historian of medicine and medical education, the award, presented biennially in the amount of $2,500, recognizes the best recent book in English on the theory and practices of the Liberal Arts. In view of Bonner's own work, special consideration was given to studies bridging the "two cultures" of the sciences and the humanities.

In 1989, Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In the book honored by the Academy of Scholars, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery, by combining two major and intertwined narrative strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer. Alongside his own story, that of a youthful humanist evolving into an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist and finally a world-class researcher, Bishop gives a fast-paced and engrossing tale of the microbe hunters, providing an introduction for nonscientists to the molecular underpinnings of cancer and concludes with an analysis of many of today's most important science-related controversies - ranging from stem cell research to the attack on evolution to scientific misconduct.

Bishop will receive the award at a symposium organized in his honor on October 22, 2004, on the Wayne State campus. Details and publicity will be released in the fall.

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