James Learmonth Gowans

Who is James Learmonth Gowans?

Sir James Learmonth "Jim" Gowans is a British physician and immunologist.

Gowans was born in Sheffield, England. He graduated in medicine in 1947 from King's College Hospital in London, 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 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted in 1982. In 1980 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine.