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Nobel, Pulitzer Prize Winners To Address Biotech Conference in New York

Washington, D.C. (February 13, 2002) – The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) today announced that Dr. Harold Varmus, recipient of the Nobel Prize in medicine and former director of the National Institutes of Health, will give the opening keynote address for the BIO CEO & Investor Conference 2002, on Wednesday, Feb. 20, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Michael Waldholz, the Wall Street Journal’s news editor for health and science and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, will give the keynote address the following day, Thursday, Feb. 21. Both speeches will begin at noon in the Waldorf-Astoria’s Grand Ballroom.

Dr. Varmus is the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He and Dr. J. Michael Bishop of the University of California-San Francisco were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 for research that led to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. In 1993, President Clinton named Dr. Varmus to serve as director of the National Institutes of Health. At NIH, Dr. Varmus initiated several changes in the conduct of many research programs, recruited new leaders to important positions, and helped to increase NIH’s budget from less than $11 billion to nearly $18 billion.

Waldholz is one of the leading biotechnology reporters in the United States, and currently oversees health and science coverage for the Wall Street Journal. He led the team of Journal reporters that won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize for a series chronicling the development and effects of new AIDS therapies. Waldholz is also the author of Curing Cancer, published by Simon & Schuster in 1997, and the co-author with Jerry Bishop of Genome, about the hunt for human genes, published in 1990. He also appears weekly on CNBC’s Power Lunch and throughout the week on that network, reporting on medical and biotechnology news.

Members of the media wishing to attend these luncheons or other conference events must register for press credentials at this Web site by Feb. 14: www.investinbio.com/ceo2002/index.htm. Contact Carrie Housman with questions at (202) 962-9200.

BIO represents more than 1,000 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations in all 50 U.S. states and 33 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of health-care, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products. For more information, please visit our Web site, www.bio.org

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