Oral history interview with Gary H. Gibbons

2023-01-10T15:34:19-05:00

Gary H. Gibbons was born in 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the youngest of three siblings. His father was pharmacist-turned-schoolteacher from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his mother was a school teacher from Camden, New Jersey who had been orphaned at a very young age. Religion and spirituality were very important in the Gibbons household. Gibbons came through the Philadelphia public school system during the beginning of desegregation and was bused from his area to a traditionally Caucasian school. Later as a result of his good grades he attended Episcopal Academy during the institution's early attempts at integration. He credits these academic opportunities for much of his success, and as a result has always felt a great responsibility to succeed. Gibbons' early interest in science came from books, electronics, and the investigation of his surroundings. Gibbons received his B.A. in Biology from Princeton University in 1978. At Princeton he participated in research and was a photographer for the school newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. He also developed an interest in the history and philosophy of science on which he wrote his senior thesis. Gibbons matriculated into Harvard Medical School, where he earned his MD in 1984. He elected to take two years off from medical school between his basic science and clinical years to pursue research in Dr. Clifford Berger's lab studying the renin-angiotensin system and cardiovascular disease. Following two years of clinical rotations Gibbons did his two-year internal medicine internship and a subsequent three-year cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1990 Gibbons was appointed assistant professor of medicine in the Cardiology Department at Stanford University, where he collaborated with Dr. Victor J. Dzau on further investigation of the renin-angiotensin system. He was then recruited back to Harvard Medical School by Dzau in 1996; there he pursued his research, focusing on the many complex factors that regulate blood pressure. In 1999 Gibbons was appointed director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. In this capacity, Gibbons oversees large amounts of research aimed at decreasing the alarmingly high incidence of cardiovascular disease in the African-American population of the southern United States. Throughout his oral history Gibbons acknowledges the many opportunities and rights obtained for him by the civil rights leaders of his day, and as a result feels a deep sense of greater purpose in his work. He has received several grants and awards, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Minority Faculty Development Fellowship, a Baxter Foundation Award, an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, and a Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences grant, which he discusses in the oral history interview.