Glenn did a promotional video for Trinity Mother Frances Health System, where he had both shoulders surgically repaired from dislocations during his high school career.
In 1934, Egon Orowan, Michael Polanyi and G. I. Taylor, almost simultaneously realized that plastic deformation could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations.
At the age of 18, Bowman was briefly a professional rugby player for Saracens F.C., before suffering two shoulder dislocations in his first year and being asked to leave.
In the 1980s he turned to the study of the interaction of dislocations with interstitial hydrogen, acting as a mobile point defect, and hence on reliable methods for electrolytically introducing H in the samples, controlling the occurrence of hydride precipitation.