Bishop is Chancellor and University Professor of the University of California, San Francisco. He is an internationally recognized authority on the molecular mechanisms of cancer. After earning a M.D. at Harvard, he pursued an interest in molecular biology. He teaches medical and graduate students, he has served on the editorial boards of major scientific journals and on numerous advisory boards for private foundations and the federal government; he has been active in national and local efforts to improve the funding of biomedical research; and he directs the G.W. Hooper Research Foundation at UCSF. He is past chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board for the National Cancer Institute.

Bishop has been honored by awards for his teaching; election to the National Academy of Science, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to the Institute of Medicine, to the American Philosophical Society, and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received numerous awards including the American Association of Medical Colleges Award for Distinguished Research; the Albert Lasker Award for basic Medical Research; the Armand Hammer Cancer Research Award; the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Medal; the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor; and the 125th Anniversary Medal from UCSF. In 1989, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his colleague, Harold Varmus, for their discovery that normal cells contain genes capable of becoming cancer genes.