William E. Bowers ’60

Bill died of pancreatic cancer May 9, 2013, in Columbia, S.C.

Born in Sunbury, Pa., Bill prepared for Princeton at Chatham (N.J.) High School. At Princeton, he majored in chemistry, sang in the Chapel Choir and the Glee Club, and took his meals at Cloister Inn.

After graduation, Bill entered medical school at Columbia. After one year, he transferred to a doctoral program in biochemical cytology at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later to become Rockefeller University) and worked four years in postdoctoral research at the University of Louvain in Belgium and at Oxford University, where he began a lifelong concentration in immunology.

Bill then joined the faculty at Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Christian de Duve, who received the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1974. A subsequent research appointment at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y., was followed by his appointment as chairman of the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 1990.

Among Bill’s passions were training young people, listening to music, and cooking — especially cobbler with his homegrown blueberries.

Bill is survived by his wife, Barbara; son Kevin ’94; daughter-in-law Ingrid; daughter Kendra and her husband, Mica Bodenheimer; his brother, Henry ’57; sister Sally; and six grandchildren. The class extends sympathy to all the family.