ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

so we thought we could make it. So we… in 1955, we arrived in Iran. And it’s the best thing that ever happened
because that is…my work in Iran and research I did there was eventually the reason why I was invited at the
University of Chicago.
Clip 5 - Job at University of Chicago: When I went to England, that is, as I said, well I was looking for soming
else to do and I remembered Dr. Alving who was the…who initiated the studies of this enzyme defi ciency
that we were studying in Iran. And I remembered what he said. He said, “Now Dr. Bowman, when you come to
Chicago, I’d like for you to see me, you know, talk to me and look me up.” And so I called him up and he said
“Oh, oh, I remember.” He said “Come over, I want to see you.” So we started chatting and chatting and chatting
and then the next day he said, “You know what?” He said, he said, “We’d like to invite you to be on the faculty
of the University of Chicago,” which came out of the blue. I didn’t expect it at all, what have you. And so he
said, but, he said the chairman of the Department of Medicine - at that time the blood bank was in the Department
of Medicine - and since I was a pathologist and I did all sorts of pathology, the blood bank, he said, “We
need someone in the blood bank, to head the blood bank.” And that, oddly enough, was in the Department of
medicine and he said, “But the chairman in the Department of Medicine, Dr. Jacobson, is going to be in the International
Congress of Hematology, and are you going?” I said, “Yes, I’m going there too, in Mexico.” He said,
“Well, he’ll see you there.” And so I’m in his hotel and he said, “Let’s go out tomorrow, out to the pyramids,”
and so he took me out to the pyramids, and we talked and chatted all day long and, when we came back, he said,
“Well, you know, I’d like for you to be on the faculty,” just like that, I didn’t have an interview or anything else.
Of course well, I said something about an interview, and he said, “Well, you’ve been with me all day long,” he
said, “that’s your interview,” so that’s how I started on the faculty of the University of Chicago.
Clip 6 - The Death of Death: I think that cancer will be a disease of the past one day. I mean, there are spectacular
things going on, not only are there cures, but prevention also too. There’s a tremendous amount of research
going on this. One of the books that I will not write will be called “The Death of Death,” in which people will
no longer die…other than by accident and our own crazy things, that many of these diseases will be completely
prevented or eradicated. And then of course if you have the death of death, what kind of world would this be
without death? I mean, we’re being philosophical about it. But one of these days it’ll happen, other than by accident,
and murder, and our own inhumanity to each other, it will happen. Yes. And I think that it will be that we
will—I mean, after all, in my day and time, many diseases have been eradicated: polio, smallpox. Of course it
may come back, you know, and what have you, and all of that, but there are things that have happened like that.
I haven’t, I saw smallpox in Iran, several cases of it, but you don’t see it today, and so why can’t we conquer all
of these other things, too?
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