In the competition for books published in 2002 and 2003, the prize was awarded to J. Michael Bishop for How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science. Published in 2003 by Harvard University Press, the book intertwines two strands of medical history: ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and efforts to find and attack causes of cancer. Alongside this account, Bishop traces his personal evolution from a young humanist to an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist, and finally, along with Harold Varmus, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for the discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer.