Early in the year of 2003, two distinguished scientists gave their support to the MIM. Nobel laureates Dr Harold Varmus and Dr Ahmed Zewail have assumed the roles of Patrons of the MIM effort. Dr Varmus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1989, for the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. After heading the National Institutes of Health between 1993-1999, Dr Varmus was appointed President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Dr Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1999 for his pioneering studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. Dr Zewail is presently the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics, and the Director of the NSF center, the Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (LMS), at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).