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After high school, I went directly to Ole Miss where I spent most of my first year in the beer joints in Holly Springs. To make ends meet, I started washing dishes in an immunology lab on campus, discovered that I actually had a taste for research, and have been at it since. I cut down on the trips north, got serious about school, and graduated with a BS in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1974.
I moved to the University of California San Francisco for postdoctoral training in immunology and molecular biology. I lucked out there by meeting my wife, Roberta, who had just finished her Ph.D. at Berkeley. As you can see from the picture, I got the better end of the deal. I also lucked out by being offered a faculty position there and ultimately worked with two groups whose leaders went on to get Nobel prizes for cancer genes and prions (the thing that causes Mad Cow Disease). It was an exciting time to say the least. During this time, I also worked for a short period at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and with another group in Rome.
We enjoyed living in San Francisco but left in 1984 to join a new immunology program at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore. We’ve been here 21 years this August. About 10 years ago, Roberta and I were offered positions in a new virology institute in the university that focuses primarily on AIDS. The institute is headed by Bob Gallo, who co-discovered the virus that causes AIDS, and I am now head of AIDS vaccine research there. We have laboratory and clinical sites in a number of African countries, the Caribbean, and, most recently, China. I also work with a couple of groups in Italy and France, so I rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles. I am a co-founder of a biotech company, ProfectusBiosciences. You can find out more about what we do at www.ihv.org.
Over the years, we made it back to Oxford less and less and then not at all for 11 years. This changed in 1998 when my daughter, Shanna, and her husband, Walter, got fed up with living in Manhattan and decided to move south. They had been living at the foot of the World Trade Center and working there occasionally after graduating New York University, so it was more than a good move.
Roberta and I have been visiting the “kids” and my sister Sue down in Oxford at least a couple of times a year and we really love the place. Our first granddaughter was born there a year ago last February. Shanna is also working slowly on a graduate degree in English at Ole Miss but she’s working harder on raising one baby and trying to make another one. The support systems for kids she tells me about in Oxford sound amazing. Walter is the back end programmer and co-owner of an e.business in Manhattan (www.ersvp.com) and has co-founded a new fencing school in Oxford (www.oxfordfencing.com).
Aside from visiting with family and working, I still hack at the guitar (40 years and still no improvement), work a little in the garden, and hike when I’ve got time. Roberta and I also like to collect wine. That habit takes us to the south of France with some frequency and I’ve gotten pretty good at speaking the language. I never go that I don’t think of Miss Dallmann and how hard she tried to knock it into my head 40 years ago. I will be forever grateful for her and for our other teachers who were great even if I was too stupid to realize it back then. I guess you can add teachers to the old saying “the older I get, the smarter my parents get”. I’m looking forward to reading about everybody else on the website, though I was saddened to see how many of us have already passed on. More Photos.
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George Lewis