James L. Gowans

James L. Gowans (1979)

Sir James Learmonth Gowans , called Jim Gowans, (born May 7, 1924 in Sheffield - † April 1, 2020 ) was a British medical doctor and immunologist .

Gowans graduated from King's College Hospital in London in 1947, graduated in Physiology from Oxford in 1948, and received his Ph.D. (Ph.D.) from Howard Walter Florey at the William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, where he studied Turned to immunology. He then became Professor of Experimental Pathology at Oxford. In 1977 he left his research career to become secretary of the Medical Research Council for ten years . In 1989 he became Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program in Strasbourg.

He made important discoveries about the role of lymphocytes in the immune defense. In particular, he showed that some lymphocytes were not short-lived, as previously assumed, but migrated from the blood to the lymphatic system and back. At the initiative of Peter Medawar , he also carried out experiments on rats that showed that lymphocytes played an important role in tissue rejection during transplants.

In 1963 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and ennobled in 1982. In 1980 he received the Wolf Prize for Medicine. He is an external member of the National Academy of Sciences (1985), a full member of the Academia Europaea (1991) and multiple honorary doctorates. In 1968 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 1990 the Medawar Prize. In 1974 he received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize .

Since 1956 he was married to Moira Leatham, with whom he had a son and two daughters.

literature

• Leslie Brent A history of transplantation immunology , Academic Press 1997

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary for James L. Gowans. Retrieved May 6, 2020 .