Gabriel Anabwani

Ever since I can remember I have been fascinated by the factors that determine heredity. I learned later that these are called genes in English. Born in rural colonial Kenya in 1948, I graduated from the University of Nairobi medical school in 1975 and later earned a Master of Medicine degree in pediatrics, completed a British Council Fellowship in pediatric cardiology at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, UK and a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at McMaster University, Canada. I taught pediatrics at the University of Nairobi and at Moi University in Kenya before relocating to Botswana in 1997. Since then I became deeply involved in the care of children living with HIV as this disease had become the major killer of children in Botswana and indeed in sub-Sahara Africa. Working with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine, we established the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinical Centre of Excellence, the first free standing pediatric HIV care clinic in Africa in 2003. We are now interested in understanding why some children who are infected with HIV progress rapidly to AIDS and death while others survive for many years without clinical evidence of disease. Similarly, some children who are co-infected with tuberculosis progress rapidly why others do not. Is there a genetic explanation for this? Understanding the genetic basis for these phenomena opens many therapeutic possibilities. That is why we have formed CAfGEN - a Collaborative African Genomics Network to spearhead this research.

January 2014