the couple moved to Denver, Barbara taught at Colorado Women’s College. When his service ended in 1955, neither he nor Barbara could stomach “anything that smacked of segregation,” he recounted in the oral history. “We. . . said, ‘. . . Why don’t we find a position overseas. . .?’” They decamped to Nemazee Hospital in Shiraz, Iran, where Bowman became chair of pathology. Barbara taught preschool and lectured in psychology and anthropology at the hospitalaffiliated medical school. “It completely changed the trajectory of his career,” said his daughter, Valerie Bowman Jarrett, now a senior advisor to President Barack Obama and chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls. From this unlikely setting, Bowman bootstrapped himself into the forefront of the emerging field of genetics. It all began with a fateful encounter with a gravely ill little girl. Miraculously, following a blood transfusion, the child recovered. Bowman and his colleagues were mystified, he recalled in the 2006 interview. But a visit by Bowman to a market where he spotted fava beans provided the breakthrough. They were dealing with favism, a genetic condition in which consuming fava beans triggers a dangerous anemic reaction. Bowman led expeditions to collect blood samples from among Iran’s ethnic groups to understand susceptibility to favism across different populations. The fieldwork offered a fascinating glimpse into different cultures, the genetic footprints of their movement and the evolutionary dynamics shaping genetics. uchospitals.edu/midway
Bowman was a mentor. “He’d had a tough time himself and was bound and determined to make it easier for the next generation,” said his daughter, Valerie Bowman Jarrett. “His office door was always open.” Bowman immersed himself in the literature. “I taught myself,” he said in the oral history. “It was partly biochemical genetics, anthropology, history. . . It was wonderful.” He struck up correspondences with researchers worldwide, including Alf Alving, MD, who was at the University of Chicago, where researchers had linked the same genetic mutation involved in favism to a potentially fatal reaction to the antimalarial primaquine. Alving invited Bowman to look him up should he return to America. It was a formative time on the personal front, too, said Jarrett, born in Iran in 1956. “It strengthened my parents’ relationship because they were so far from home and had to rely on each other. They also made lifelong friends they treasured deeply.” In 1960, they left Iran for the University of London, where Bowman had won a fellowship at the Galton Institute, a pioneering training ground for geneticists. Here, he would finally “learn the genetics that I’d been reading about,” he said in the 2006 interview. Returning to America in
1961, he took up Alving’s offer. The calm but forthright manner that students and colleagues would come to know was on display in that initial conversation. “[Alving] said, ‘Dr. Bowman, I have a paper here I want you to read. . . What do you think of it?’” Bowman recalled in the 2006 interview. “I looked at the paper and I saw that their statistics were all wrong, and the conclusion. . . I called him up and I said, ‘Your paper is wrong.’ He said, ‘What?’. . . And I went back and explained why it was wrong.” Bowman subsequently was offered a dual appointment as assistant professor of medicine and pathology, and director of the University’s blood bank. “A new era of genetic enlightenment occurred in the 1950s,” said Alvin Tarlov, MD’56, former University of Chicago chair of medicine. “Jim was the expert on the clinical meaning of genetic disorders that affected red blood cells.” Bowman’s field studies in population genetics took him to Mexico, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Uganda. From 1959 to 1967, he published eight papers
in Nature, six as lead author. A summation of much of his research, “Genetic Variation and Disorders in Peoples of African Origin,” came out in 1990 and was co-written with Robert F. Murray, Jr., now-retired chairman of the Department of Genetics and Human Genetics at Howard. But Bowman was never too busy to extend a helping hand to students. From 1986 to 1990, this mentoring was done in his capacity as Pritzker’s assistant dean of students for minority affairs. “It was supposed to be a 20 percent commitment, but some days it took 100 percent of the time. He didn’t compartmentalize,” recalled colleague Rosita Ragin, now assistant dean for multicultural and student affairs. “He’d had a tough time himself and was bound and determined to make it easier for the next generation,” said Jarrett. “His office door was always open.” That door happened to be next to Pritzker’s main lecture hall. And into it streamed a procession of students, many now leaders at the University. William A. McDade, MD’90, PhD’88, associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care and the University’s deputy provost for research and minority issues, visited Room P117 as a precocious 20-year-old graduate student, clutching “Research in Progress,” a catalog of research opportunities for the Biological Sciences Division. McDade, who was nearing the end of his first year in the Medical Scientist Training Program, emerged following a counseling session with a project selected that would set him on the path
MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY
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