James Learmonth Gowans

Sir James Learmonth Gowans, called Jim Gowans, ( born May 7, 1924 in Sheffield ) is a British physician and immunologist.

Gowans graduated as a doctor in 1947 at King's College Hospital in London, made in 1948 with a degree in physiology at Oxford and a doctorate ( Ph.D.) at the Howard Florey Walter at the William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, where he is the Immunology turned. He then became professor of experimental pathology at Oxford. In 1977, he left his career to research for ten years secretary of the Medical Research Council to be. He became Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program, Strasbourg 1989.

He succeeded in attaining significant discoveries on the role of lymphocytes in the immune response. In particular, he showed that some lymphocytes, as previously assumed, were not short-lived, but by the blood into the lymphatic system and hiked back. On the initiative of Peter Medawar he also undertook experiments on rats that showed that lymphocytes play an important role in tissue rejection in transplantation.

In 1963 he was knighted Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1982. In 1980 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine. He was a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences and several honorary doctorates. In 1968 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 1990 Medawar price. In 1974 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.

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