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Harold Varmus has made a start on one of his first priorities as chief of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI): coming up with a set of key unanswered questions. Last Saturday, Varmus brought together about 25 top researchers and NCI leaders for a brainstorming session on the Bethesda, Maryland, campus.

The "big questions" project was one of several ideas Varmus threw out when he took the helm of NCI last July after stepping down as director of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He's now calling his idea "the provocative questions exercise." It will explore "old," "forgotten" observations as well as recent but ignored ones that could be investigated with new tools, he says.

For example, Varmus says, he'd like to know why testicular cancer can be cured with conventional chemotherapy and why obese people are more prone to certain cancers such as colon and breast cancer. He also wants to upend the conventional wisdom that it's impossible to find drugs that block so-called transcription factors, which are proteins that control the expression of genes.

Last week's meeting drew together leading researchers such as Tyler Jacks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles Sawyers of Sloan-Kettering, and Irving Weissman of Stanford University. "It was a very interesting first meeting," Varmus says. Next, he wants to set up a Web site where other researchers can add their ideas. And there will likely be more meetings with other disciplines--in particular, behavioral scientists and clinicians were underrepresented last week, Varmus says.

Once the list is finished, Varmus might hold a special competition to invite proposals for several questions and fund, say, 15 of the best ideas. Research funding may be tight, but "we've got over a $5 billion budget," Varmus says. Nothing has been decided, though. Right now, he says, "we're just trying to have a conversation that evolves into something useful."

Harold Varmus, Nobel saria 50 urte baino ez zituenean jaso eta gero, Sloan Kettering Institute (Isaren laborategia zegoen tokia) zuzendu zuen eta orain Obamaren zientzia gurua bihurtu da.