James Learmonth Gowans, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetJames Learmonth Gowans
British medical doctor and immunologist
Date of Birth: 17-May-1924
Place of Birth: Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Profession: physician
Nationality: United Kingdom
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About James Learmonth Gowans
- Sir James Learmonth Gowans, (born 7 May 1924) is a British physician and immunologist.
- In 1945 while studying medicine at King's College Hospital, he assisted at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a voluntary medical student.Gowans was born in Sheffield, England.
- He graduated in medicine in 1947 from King's College Hospital, then in 1948 obtained a degree in physiology at Oxford, followed by a Ph.D.
- with Howard Florey at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford on lymphocytes.
- He then became professor of experimental pathology at Oxford.
- In 1977, he left his research career for ten years to be secretary of the Medical Research Council.
- He served as Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program in 1989. He made significant discoveries about the role of lymphocytes in the immune response.
- In particular, he showed that some lymphocytes were not short-lived, as previously assumed, but moved from the blood into the lymphatic system and back.
- On the initiative of Peter Medawar he also undertook experiments on rats that showed that lymphocytes play an important role in transplant rejection. In 1963 Gowans became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
- He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1971 New Year Honours for services to medical science and a Knight Bachelor in the 1982 New Year Honours.
- In 1980 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine.
- He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences and a SSI Honorary Member (1971), and received several honorary doctorates.
- In 1968 he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 1990 shared the first Medawar Prize with Jacques Miller.
- In 1974 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.
- He won the Royal Medal in 1976.In 1956 he married Moira Leatham, with whom he has a son and two daughters.
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