If there is a purpose in life for everyone, perhaps the purpose for Greg Bowman is to solve a problem. Maybe for himself or maybe just for others who will come later.

Kevin Stearns/University Photography

Greg Bowman, who has macular degeneration, uses magnified text on his computer screen.

At a very early age Bowman began to suffer from macular degeneration, a condition in which the fine-detail receptors in the center of the retina deteriorate. His vision rapidly declined from 20-20 to about 20-200 in the "good" eye and 20-400 in the other. His younger brother has the same condition, suggesting a genetic origin, and, indeed, the disease has been traced to a defect in a single gene. By the time Bowman reached middle school, he recalls, there was a lot of publicity about the human genome project, and he thought, "I could get into that and maybe fix my own problem."

At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Alexandria, Va., Bowman concentrated on biology and genetics, but after taking a required course in computer science, he realized he could use computers to control experiments in biology and manage the mountains of data being generated in genetics. He chose Cornell for its strong programs in both computer science and chemical and biological engineering. And "I like the outdoors," he adds.

In his freshman year, he and five friends visited the Seal and Serpent Society house and found that its membership was down to just a handful of brothers. They saw that not as a problem but an opportunity. "We joined and sort of took over the place." As president during his sophomore and junior years, Bowman made the house into a low-key place belying the usual beer-party image and about doubled its membership.

He also found a home on campus in the Navigators, a Christian group that, as he describes it, "is Biblically based, but we don't read stuff into it." He will spend the coming summer working at the group's national headquarters in Colorado and telecommuting to a job with the Ithaca firm Gene Network Science, working on computer simulations of heart cells for possible use in drug testing. In the fall he will enter Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in biophysics.

As for fixing his own problem, "I still have that in my mind," he admits, "but right now there's a lot of foundational science that needs to be done. I'm focusing on the general principles that might underlie some sort of solution."