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For 150 years, Emory’s School of Medicine has defined and redefined itself,
overcoming obstacle after obstacle and using the occasion to raise the bar yet higher. The school endured struggles for sheer survival in its early days, followed by heated disputes over priorities as competing agendas vied for time and money.Today, the school is at a turning point—mature and strong enough to recognize its potential, but also young and bold enough to dare to set a whole new standard, and not just for itself, but for medical education as a whole. The school now is embarking on a new way of teaching, with new tools, new precedents, and new investment of attention and resources to prepare the next generation to transform medicine for the 21st century.



Breaking free from the pack 

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a young high school principal named Abraham Flexner to evaluate the medical schools in this country. At the time, medical education bore little resemblance to the well-regarded, science-based endeavor we are familiar with today. Almost anyone who claimed some medical training could start a medical school, and many did. Most lacked an adequate relationship with hospitals or other facilities where students could receive appropriate clinical instruction, and many tended to expend more energy collecting tuition than actually teaching students. Attendance standards were minimal, and requirements for graduation varied widely from school to school.
     Unlike predecessors who had undertaken previous evaluations of the state of medical education, Flexner wasted little time on diplomacy. His now-famous Flexner Report was scathing in its critique, lambasting the majority of schools for shortcomings ranging from filthy conditions to a glaring lack of student interaction with patients. One now-extinct Atlanta school exemplified the problem, as Flexner wrote, with its “indescribably foul” anatomy room containing a single cadaver and a pathology lab made up of a “few dirty slides and three ordinary microscopes. . . . Nothing more disgraceful calling itself a medical school can be found anywhere,” he said.
     Of the four schools in Atlanta at the time, however, the two that would become Emory’s medical school fared better under Flexner’s scrutiny. Both the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons and its rival, the Atlanta School of Medicine, were cleaner and better equipped than the other two schools, according to Flexner, with the added bonus of access to “fairly abundant clinical material” at Grady Memorial Hospital.
     Flexner’s main advice to medical schools was to align with a university or shut down. In response to incentives offered by medical organizations attempting to enforce Flexner’s recommendations, the two “good” Atlanta medical schools put aside competition and consolidated in 1913 under the name Atlanta Medical College. The newly merged school was promptly rewarded for this act with an “A” rating from the new accreditation system of the Association of American Medical Colleges and American Medical Association. In 1915, Atlanta Medical College took the next logical step in its quest for stature and transferred its holdings, about $22,000 in property near Grady Hospital, to Emory University.
     Emory’s founders, including Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler, gave the medical school $250,000 for an endowment and began building two pink-marble, redtile-roof laboratory buildings on its campus in Druid Hills. Dean W. S. Elkin wanted a hospital on campus, and Candler arranged for transfer of Wesley Memorial Hospital from downtown Atlanta.
     What more could a dean want? Having survived the Flexner Report and found a supportive university home, Elkin believed the medical school now had a chance to become the great teaching institution he and his colleagues had hoped it could be. But when he turned his attention to the bigger playing field, he clearly saw some catching up to do.
     “Within a short night’s ride of Atlanta. . .” he wrote, “Vanderbilt [medical school] has $8 million for a modern hospital, laboratories, and endowment.”

Claiming a clinical turf

What Emory lacked in elaborate laboratories and study facilities, it made up for in providing its students the essential experience of hands-on patient care.
     “Ward walks” at Grady had been one of the competitive edges Emory’s predecessor schools had offered prospective students, and the new school intensified its presence there. By 1921, Emory was responsible for Grady’s African-American patients, although state law still forbade students to go near the white patients in the segregated facility. It would be another 10 years before students gained access to these patients as well.
     But by 1925, medical students also were being assigned to the on-campus Wesley Memorial Hospital—an easily negotiated arrangement since the medical dean was also the hospital superintendent. In the 1940s, the school assumed responsibility for patients at Lawson General Hospital, a forerunner of today’s VA Medical Center. In the next decade, Crawford Long Hospital came under the Emory wing. The addition of Egleston and Wesley Woods, later yet, to the mix would spread Emory’s teaching across the full spectrum of care, from pediatrics to geriatrics.
     But for many of the faculty and all of the students, the soul of Emory’s medical school remained at Grady, where Emory’s reputation was built as a place to learn patient care. When a 1946 university strategic plan predicted increased growth of the medical campus at Emory, some were wary.
     Faculty watched closely, with measuring eye, the dispersion of resources and respect between the two campuses, Emory and Grady. Whatever Grady’s endemic financial problems as a public hospital, most faculty believed they were more than outweighed by the educational opportunities it provided and by their own personal commitment to Grady patients. As would be demonstrated some decades later, any dean who failed to take this commitment into account would be taken aback at the opposition he met.
Time out! You can't teach without faculty

“Abundant clinical material” aside, Emory struggled mightily for decades to provide the essentials one normally expects from a medical school—particularly, a paid clinical faculty. By 1940, the medical school still continued to rely on the largely volunteer efforts of local doctors who managed to carve out time from their practices to teach students at Grady. One administrator wrote, “The first thing the physicians do is serve the patients, and teaching seems to be secondary.”
     But paying faculty cost a lot of money, and better teaching meant bigger budgets. In 1942, the school hired Eugene Stead to chair the Department of Medicine at an astonishing annual salary of $8,000. With this and other such hirings, the red ink began to flow.
     By 1945, the annual budget, only $100,000 just 20 years earlier, had grown to $390,000, while income from tuition and the endowment covered less than half of that.
      At Grady meanwhile, physicians were already providing well over $1 million in uncompensated care annually, requiring salary support from the medical school as well as funds to support program growth.
     “I don’t know what we can do about medical school costs,” wrote university leader Robert Mizell to a trustee at the time. “I don’t see how we can go ahead, yet I know we can’t afford to turn back.”
     People began to wonder aloud if Emory could even afford to keep its medical school. And some seemed eager to see it close. While medical faculty, and even some donors, complained that the university paid too little attention to medicine, other schools in the university protested that the administration favored the medical school over them. Why should medicine get all that help? More than one medical dean countered that no other part of the university was expected to do what medicine did: What if the business school was asked to prepare the next generation of business professionals with few salaried faculty while actually doing a third of all the business in Atlanta and taking responsibility for virtually all the research going on in the city?
     But just as the crisis reached its climax, an unprecedented event occurred. What saved the day for the medical school, the university, and indirectly, the city of Atlanta, was kindness mixed with vision—and certainly not that of a stranger.
A champion appears

Robert Woodruff, the legendary Coca-Cola leader, wanted Atlanta to have a strong medical complex, and he knew that meant a strong medical school. In the mid-1940s he took on the school’s deficit himself, covering annual losses as high as $400,000 and sustaining this support for the next several years till a solution could be found.
     Most important, Woodruff made it possible for the medical school to find a way to help itself. With Woodruff’s support and backing, physician faculty formed a medical practice plan, The Emory Clinic, whose profits not only would erase the school’s deficits but give it financial autonomy and position it to grow in ways previously unimagined.
     The plan worked as follows: Faculty would teach at least one day a week and on the other days work in the clinic, where they would earn their own salaries, cover operational costs, and contribute money to the medical school to support additional programs. The clinical structure allowed the medical school to recruit the growing number of specialists and subspecialists increasingly needed for state-of-the-art patient care.

Sitting out the game

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new game emerged, and many medical schools rushed to play. As Emory focused on solidifying its financial foothold and cementing its reputation in teaching and patient care, the newly formed National Institutes of Health was pouring out Cold War–era research dollars on willing institutions.
     It was a heady time for research, but Emory held back. While other schools built up their research programs, Dean Arthur Richardson and his longstanding department chairs—picked because they were either great teachers or great clinicians—continued to expand what they considered the medical school’s primary missions: teaching students and taking care of patients.
     Not until the mid-1960s did Richardson and others even begin to talk about building more research labs and recruiting research-oriented faculty. When he retired in 1979, he admitted that the school’s research record was not as great as it ought to be.
     But that record was about to change. That same year a miracle occurred, the likes of which had never been seen in academia.
     Again, Robert Woodruff, patron saint of the medical school, came to the rescue by turning over $105 million from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation. The largest single gift ever given to a university in the country at the time, this money catapulted Emory overnight into the South’s most well-funded private university and one of the best-funded universities anywhere in the country. Emory was determined to make the most of this unbelievable opportunity.
Getting with the program

Richardson’s 23 years as dean (1956–1979) had marked the longest run of any medical dean anywhere in the country. During the next 23 years, the medical school would have five different deans, counting the current dean, Thomas Lawley. Strikingly different in personalities and interests, all shared an intense ambition for the medical school to break into the top 10 research schools in the nation. This would require rapid, consistent growth. Many schools had been investing in their research programs for 50, 75, even 100 years.
     James Glenn, who had built a small urology program at Duke into a large section and had been successful at fund-raising from alumni and grateful patients, was recruited to replace Richardson. He hit the ground running. Several of the previous generation of department chairs retired with the former dean, and they promptly were replaced with people primed to bring in research funding. The school’s grant base quadrupled, from $10 million to $40 million. When Glenn resigned in 1983, there was no question that the new dean had to be someone who appreciated research.
     So Emory headed straight to the research well, wooing Richard Krause, then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Intrigued with Emory’s potential, its born-again research ambition, and the fact that a new research building was in the works, Krause signed on.
     Dedicated in 1990, the Rollins Research Center not only doubled the amount of research space across campus, it also created a new pattern of interaction between the medical school and university. The building, made possible by a gift from businessman O. Wayne Rollins, was to be shared by researchers from both sides of campus to create synergy—it was hoped—among different fields of expertise.
     Today, it is hard to fathom the anxiety created by planning for this new building—leaders of other parts of the university argued for placement of the center on “their” side of campus to prevent their students from having to walk to the far hinterlands of the medical side. And the financial officer turned pale upon learning what a bridge over the railroad tracks would cost. But Emory President James Laney overrode those concerns, and the Rollins Research Center went up across from the medical library, within a good stone’s throw of the entrance to Lullwater. Finally, the university and medical school were beginning to look like a research institution.
     As more of the old guard chairs began to retire or move to other responsibilities, Krause, like his predecessor, recruited in the new research mode. To chair the huge Department of Medicine, for example, he brought in well-known nephrology researcher Juha Kokko, who himself recruited numerous research-oriented administrators and faculty. The needle on the dial in NIH funding climbed higher.
Rumblings of discontent

But beneath the heady research clamor, the first stirrings of discontent began to emerge. Some faculty were concerned that the effort to expand research was eclipsing the mission to teach future doctors and provide patient care. And one of Krause’s projects inadvertently added fuel to the fire.
     Charged with realigning the balance at Emory of patient care, teaching, and research, Krause perceived the clinical faculty’s time as being so heavily committed to patient care, especially at Grady, that they would never have time for research. He established a faculty committee, headed by psychiatry chair Jeffrey Houpt, to re-examine the school’s longstanding relationship with the public hospital. The report came back: Emory would never walk away from Grady Hospital.
     This exercise damaged Krause’s credibility with faculty. Frustrated, feeling cut out of major decisions (such as the one to move epidemiology out of the medical school to create a new school of public health), Krause began to discuss leaving. Charles Hatcher, former director of the clinic and by then head of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC), called the president and said, “Jim, why don’t we ‘grow’ a dean?” Houpt was appointed as a kind of chief of staff to Krause. When Krause asked to step down, Houpt was promoted from “deputy dean” to the real thing.
     Houpt, like his predecessors, set about to fill the medical school’s research plate, recruiting powerful chairs and overseeing a $50 million renovation of the 1950s-era Woodruff Memorial Research Building to add more research space. Determined to keep propelling research forward, he was also mindful of the danger in failing to keep his eye on the ball in the school’s other missions.

Finally, a full-out contest

When he arrived in the dean’s office, Houpt was well aware of a need, for example, to ease the tension that had built up between researchers and clinicians. As research had become more and more important to the medical school, many clinicians felt that they were no longer the favored siblings. And the way they saw it, they were still expected to work like crazy to support the children upon whom mom and dad now smiled so lovingly.
     Furthermore, they were now finding it almost impossible to advance into tenured positions. When the chair of a promotion committee told Hatcher, for example, that a young surgeon had too few research credentials (meaning NIH grants)
to be promoted, Hatcher exploded. “Don’t come to The Emory Clinic when you get sick,” he said, “because that surgeon won’t be there and we’ll have to have you treated by the best damn dog researcher we have!”
     To defuse the situation, Houpt implemented a new plan for faculty promotion in which faculty could choose between two tracks—research or clinical—under which to be considered. Faculty on the clinical track would be eligible for promotion to professor based on their clinical research, publications, and other contributions, but since their income was covered by the clinic rather than the medical school, this meant they would be ineligible for tenure. No one but the chair and faculty member would know which track had been chosen, and there were no differences in titles—a professor was a professor.
     The tenure issue bothered some clinicians, who worried initially that the dual system was a bait and switch. But when one of Emory’s most respected tenured associate professors of surgery, Joseph Craver, voluntarily asked to be considered for professorship on the clinical track, thus giving up tenure, much of this suspicion ended.
     As Houpt worked to improve relations between the research and clinical siblings, research income continued to climb. During his deanship, annual income grew to almost $99 million. In 1995, Emory University finally gained membership in the prestigious American Association of Universities (AAU), one of the hallmarks of recognition in research standing. Houpt says, “It was no coincidence that Emory University got into the AAU after—and only after—the medical school moved up 20 notches in NIH research rankings. It’s not that the medical school is better than the other components of the university, but it is the school that can generate the big research dollars that influence those rankings. If the English Department had its own NIH, then maybe they could do it as well.”
     Nine years later, Houpt, who left Emory in 1996 and recently stepped down as medical dean at the University of North Carolina, recalls how university leadership always believed him when he told them the medical school was great—but less so when he argued that it could be so much greater with more resources.
     “I think Emory has grown into the idea of how much money it costs to be a great university,” he says now. “It’s not cheap. It meant something, and it sent a message, when they chose the medical dean from Johns Hopkins [Michael M.E. Johns] as the new executive vice president for health affairs. They knew he was going to want to put Emory on a Hopkins level, and they were ready to step up to the plate and help him do it.”

Ready to go the distance

If the 1979 Woodruff gift had been a miracle for the entire university, Michael Johns arrived to find a similar one, with the same name, waiting for him during his first month here in 1996.
     The Woodruff Fund, a $295 million gift of stock, would generate annual dividends to give him enormous flexibility to grow programs across the health sciences. His mandate? To make the WHSC, including the medical school, compete with the best in the nation.
     Johns’ first appointment, made during his second month, was to name Thomas Lawley as dean of the medical school. Lawley, the former chair of dermatology, was already serving as acting dean. He had come to Emory from the NIH and was known for his leadership prowess in research as well as political savvy and plain likeability. He was chosen from an array of people who came here from the best schools in the country to be considered for the job because “they had woken up to what was happening here at Emory,” says Johns. Together, they would be a good team.
     Johns’ first priority when he arrived was to develop strategic plans in each mission area. Out of necessity, his attention turned first to health care, to getting Emory’s hospitals and clinic into shape to face the looming threat posed by managed care.
     He had been drawn to Emory in part because of its integration of the hospitals with the academic program, the lack of which he saw as one of Hopkins’ shortcomings. Johns led the consolidation of the clinic and Emory Hospitals into one entity, Emory Healthcare, to come under the administration of the health sciences center, with access to bond ratings and benefits of philanthropy that only the academy could confer. This would make the system stronger and more nimble and efficient.
     With the health system leaner and better able to compete, the research arena was next on the agenda. For some, a strong research program may represent simply prestige and a ticket to federal funding largesse. For both Johns and Lawley, articulating a vision for research is a moral obligation, part of Emory’s contract with society: Discovery is imperative to ensure better treatment options for future generations, and innovations will come out of the best schools and the newest sciences.
     The research plan they put before the trustees was a roadmap for what the medical school and other components of the WHSC, working together, wanted to achieve, why they thought they should and could do it, and the resources that would make it possible. “We didn’t ask for space,” says Johns. “We asked to be able to change the world. The space was simply a necessary step in beginning to do that.”
     The trustees—businessmen to bishops—bought into the vision and the fact that it could not be done on the cheap.
     The largest and most targeted building plan in the university’s history began, much of it focused on research. The WHSC’s research base expanded from $141 million in 1997 to $329 million in 2004. By far the largest component of this total, of course, with more than $269 million in research funding in 2004, is in the School of Medicine.

That leaves one mission to go. . .
A new start for teaching

Some may find it ironic, and some poignant, that the last of the School of Medicine’s missions to get a new-millennium facelift is the one that mattered most to its founders: teaching.
     “The research rocket is launched,” says Lawley. As dedicated as he is to continuing to boost the research trajectory, with a goal of top 10 status by 2012, he says the time is right to focus full speed on teaching. “We made some headway in our strategic plan for teaching that we implemented in 1999, but we’ve gotten as much mileage out of that as possible, and now it’s time for a different vehicle.”
     In some sense the strongest tradition in Emory’s medical school, teaching also has always been the most vulnerable, the first of the missions to be set aside when time or money was short, out of the limelight when patient care was king, still out when research ascended. “But when all is said and done, it’s the core mission that holds the other two together,” says Lawley. “It’s the one that makes us different from a pure research institution or private clinic, and it’s the reason society holds medical schools to a different standard as bastions of truth and learning.”
     If teaching sets medical schools apart, it now faces the need for profound changes to help them fulfill their promise and obligation. Just as in 1910, medicine is again undergoing a transformation of titanic proportions. Scientists are just beginning to discover the complex ways that genes affect disease processes and to propose novel ways to prevent, treat, and even cure diseases once thought unstoppable. But this new age of medicine poses new challenges, reshaping old concepts and calling for a new direction in what students learn in medical school and how they learn it.
     Curricula in medical schools all over the country are now in need of a Flexner-type revolution once again, says Lawley. In many ways, they are still in thrall to the first one—good enough for the 20th century but inadequate for the 21st.
     “Don’t misunderstand,” he says of Emory. “We’re very good. Our students are off the charts in their scores on board exams, and they are highly sought after by every residency program in the country. But we need different ways of measuring our success, and we need to spend much more time and resources on teaching.”
     What he has in mind is a revamped curriculum that will harness and amplify the power of curiosity, as opposed to dampening it with rote memorization of information unintegrated with relevance to patients. Students will be immersed more in sustained clinical experiences from day 1, instead of the traditional order emphasizing basic science in the beginning, followed by clinical training. Under the new model, basic science will be assimilated based on its relation to patient care, with more advanced science introduced in the last two years. Lawley also wants students to have more access to simulators and actors for honing procedural and diagnostic skills and says they will spend less time—say, two hours per day—in sit-in-your-seat lectures or taking multiple-choice exams.
     Some of the ideas being discussed include eliminating or altering the old first-year rite of passage of dissecting a cadaver. Instead of wielding the scalpel themselves, students could watch “prosections” performed by people who actually know how to do the cutting. Surgeons could perform and discuss the prosections, connecting the relevance of anatomic detail to specific surgical procedures. MRIs and other images interpreted by radiologists could also be used to teach anatomy in a way that is more meaningful and relevant to the students’ experience. Students with special need or interest in dissection expertise (such as those planning to be surgeons) would be
able to take a traditional gross anatomy class in the fourth year.
     “Since students cover some of the basic science material in undergraduate years, we are discussing the idea of condensing the first two years from 24 to 18 months to free up time in the second year for self-learning, for students to explore their own interests with faculty mentors, whether in a clinical specialty, research, public health, or whatever,” Lawley explains. “We want to
help them learn how to learn, so they can keep abreast of changes in medicine and be effective and relevant in the coming decades.”
     Students will have more interaction with faculty (a target of about four hours a day), and faculty more interaction with one another in the coming years, he says. Research and clinical stars may need—and will receive—more targeted training in the art of teaching. And crucial to the vision is that teaching will be given more weight as a mission, with more protected faculty time devoted to its practice.
     A faculty steering committee is in the process of ironing out the details of a plan to implement this vision, which is due on Lawley’s desk by August. Implementation is scheduled for the first-year class in 2007.
     Lawley believes so strongly in the importance of this push forward in teaching that he has put his own money where his mouth is, joining a growing body known simply as the medical school’s “150 society,” people who have given or pledged $150,000 or more to a new building outfitted for cutting-edge medical education. He hopes others will follow his lead.
     “We’re aiming high,” says Lawley, “but we’re also getting back to our roots. We want ours to be a model of its own kind that a modern-day Flexner would point to as an example for others to follow.”

Sylvia Wrobel is the former associate vice president for Health Sciences Communications at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.
     
 
 
At the starting line . . .
     

1854                    


The Georgia legislature grants a charter for the Atlanta Medical College. Classes are held in Atlanta City Hall until a building is erected in 1856. Col. L. P. Grant, the same man for whom Grant Park is named, donates land for the new building on the corner of Butler (now Jesse Hill Jr) and Jenkins (now Armstrong) streets, with the provision that should the land ever cease to be used for medical education, it will revert to Grant’s estate.
 

1857  


John West-moreland, the first dean, runs for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly, securing both a one-year term and a $15,000 state grant to repay the construction debt for the school building.

1866                    

Faculty member Thomas Powell persuades the Atlanta City Council to donate $5,000 in city bonds to restore the school’s building and equipment, which were all but destroyed during the Civil War. However, a subsequent fight over use of his money leads to a schism of its own and the creation of a rival school, Southern Medical College, in 1878.


1892                    

Grady Memorial Hospital, a public facility founded to serve the poor, opens its doors across the street from Atlanta Medical College, expanding and continuing work started by the school, which had begun providing free treatment for indigent patients.

     
Teetering at the brink. . .
     
1898                    

The deans of both Atlanta and Southern medical colleges, W. S. Elkin and W. S. Kendrick, agree to merge the two schools, creating the Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons, with Kendrick as dean. But this union lasts just seven years, with the dean leaving to start another rival program, the Atlanta School of Medicine, in 1905.

1913                    

Atlanta College of Physicians and Surgeons
and Atlanta School of Medicine bury the hatchet again and merge to form Atlanta Medical College, reprising the school’s original 1854 name, this time with Elkin as dean. This second merger was a direct result of the Flexner Report.


1857         

Atlanta Medical College joins with Emory University to become Emory University School of Medicine, expanding its presence from Grady in 1917 to include two lab buildings on the Druid Hills campus. This is made possible by the largesse of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler. Meanwhile, faculty and others contribute to Emory’s medical school as their means allow. W. S. Kendrick, dean of two predecessor schools, donates $5,000. Dean W. S. Elkin makes several donations of $5,000 to $10,000 throughout his 10-year tenure to support projects he believes important.
     
A higher goal . . .
     
1923                    

The university gives the school $35,000 for operating expenses. This same year, faculty member F. Phinizy Calhoun gives $10,000 to the medical library, named for his father, A. W. Calhoun, who was on the faculty of the original Atlanta Medical College. in 1926, the Calhoun family gives another $32,000 to the library.

1931                    

Medical instruction, previously restricted to black patients at the segregated Grady Hospital, is expanded to include all Grady patients

1930s                    

Volunteer faculty members Edgar Paullin, Stewart Roberts, and Cy Strickler help save Emory University Hospital from financial ruin during the Great Depression by sending patients to this facility.


1940s                    

An “anonymous” donor begins covering the growing deficits as the medical school starts to hire salaried clinical faculty. This donor later helps Emory create a clinic to support the school.

1952      

The school’s first research facility, the Woodruff Memorial Research Building, is completed. It undergoes at least two renovations and additions in ensuing years.
     
1953                    

With support from Robert Woodruff, The Emory Clinic is formed for the purpose of supporting the medical school. Clinicians practice medicine there four days and teach one day a week, donating a portion of clinic revenues to support academic expenses. Contributions from the clinic grow steadily, eventually reaching some $20 million a year during the clinic’s heyday.
 
     

1957
 

Creation of the clinic
exacer-bates the “two-cam-pus” concern between faculty at Emory and Grady. Three chairs attempt a coup, circumventing the medical school structure and cutting their own separate deal to practice at Grady. The conflict inflames the Atlanta medical community. With support from the university president, the medical dean, Arthur Richardson, does some cutting of his own— relieving these chairs of their duties. This action and a full-page newspaper ad by President Goodrich White, explaining the school’s side of the story, effectively ends the brouhaha. Meanwhile, faculty such as J. Willis Hurst, a founding member of the clinic and one of Grady’s strongest supporters, demonstrate that it is possible to love and support both campuses.
 
     
Higher still. . .
     
1960                    

The U.S. Public Health Service selects Emory University Hospital as the site for one of eight national clinical research centers. Today, researchers and students have access to a second federally funded center at Grady Hospital as well.

1964                    

Juha Kokko becomes the first person to receive a dual MD/PhD degree from Emory. Kokko goes on to serve for 13 years as chair of the Department of Medicine. Today, the dual-degree program has more than 60 students. About this time, Willis Hurst launches a continuing medical education program in cardiology, attracting physicians from across the nation.

1973                   

William Patterson Timmie, manager of the Capital City Club, bequeaths much of his estate to Emory, yielding $2.4 million to establish professorships in medicine, basic science, and chemistry. If Emory as an investment is good enough for his friend Robert Woodruff, he says, it is good enough for him.
     

1979
 

Robert Woodruff and his brother George give approx-imately $105 million from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation to Emory University, the largest gift to an educational institution in history, at the time. This gift, and funds from a capital campaign launched that same year, support scholarships, professorships, and other initiatives aimed at making Emory and its medical school a major research center.
 
     

1980                   

About this time, the Harris Foundation, established by Reunette Harris and her family, begins a series of donations to fund the first of several endowed chairs as well as scholarships and research initiatives. Gifts from the Harris estate, later bequeathed to Emory, eventually total more than $21 million.

1985                   

Philanthropist Holland Ware initiates a series of gifts, which eventually total $3 million, to the Winship Cancer Center to build the center’s first research laboratories.

1986   

Atlanta industrialist O. Wayne Rollins donates $10 million for con-struction of the Rollins Research Center, which opens in 1990 and doubles the amount of research space on campus.

     
New victories . . .
     

1987                   

John Douglas and colleagues perform the first coronary stent implant in the country, continuing a tradition of pioneering techniques and research in cardiology that began mid century and continues today.

1990                   

Emory sets a national record with the fastest rising increase in research income over the previous five years of any U.S. medical school.


1992                   

Medical alumni Harper and Anne Gaston begin a series of gifts to support scholarships for medical students, with recipients chosen based on their record of community service.

1994                   

About this time, the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust begins a series of gifts to support transplant care and research at Emory. These now total more than $11 million.
     

1996
                    

The Woodruff Fund, Inc., is created from a $295 million gift of stock from the Woodruff, Whitehead, and Evans foundations, the income from which benefits the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and its Winship Cancer Institute. Subsequent additional gifts of stock by the Woodruff Foundation enable construction of the Whitehead Biomedical Research Building and a new building for Winship.
 
     
A new era . . .
     

1997                    

The creation of Emory Healthcare consolidates all of Emory’s health care components into a fully integrated, patient-centered health system. Today, it is the largest, most comprehensive health care system in the state. This year, too, Emory Children’s Center is created to integrate pediatrics care at Emory. It is now the largest pediatric multispecialty group practice in the state.
 
     

1998                    

Emory and Georgia Tech create the first joint, two-school department of biomedical engineering in the country. Now, seven years later, it is ranked as the No. 2 biomedical engineering department in the country by U.S. News & World Report.

1999  

The Emory Vaccine Research Center’s new home, an addition to Yerkes National Primate Research Center, is dedicated. Led by a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, Rafi Ahmed, the center focuses on new vaccine technologies and strategies for AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, and other diseases. Currently, researcher Harriet Robinson has one of the most promising HIV vaccines in clinical trials.

2000                    


Jane Fonda begins a series of gifts now totaling almost $5 million to support programs to prevent teen pregnancy.

2001                    

The Whitehead Biomedical Research Building opens, adding 325,000 square feet of research space.

Andrew McKelvey, CEO of the company that created the Internet career portal Monster.com, gives $20 million to Emory to fund a center and endowed chair in lung transplantation.

     

2002                    

Emory Crawford Long Hospital undergoes a major redevelopment, opening a six-story diagnostic and treatment center topped by a 14-story medical office building.

2003   

Dedication of the new building for the Winship Cancer Institute coincides with receipt of a planning grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a major step toward the goal of achieving NCI designation of the institute as a comprehensive cancer center. The building contains lab and treatment space for clinician-researchers like Fadho Khuri.
     The medical school receives a generous portion of the Charles and Peggy Evans estate, approximately $16 million, which will help fund a new building for medical education.

     

2003                    

Emory clinicians perform the country’s first artificial cornea transplant; the world’s fifth nonsurgical repair of a faulty mitral valve; the state’s first closed-chest, off-pump cardiac bypass; and Georgia’s first islet cell transplant to cure diabetes.

 
     
Set to raise the bar again. . .
     
  2004                    

A $27 million Neuroscience Research Facility, located next to Yerkes National Primate Research Center, opens with 92,000 square feet of research space and state-of-the-art laboratories and imaging facilities.

A $42 million, 153,000-square-foot building for the Emory Children’s Center and Department of Pediatrics opens, combining patient care and research space in one facility, to help each influence the other.

Infectious disease specialist Carlos del Rio, and human genetics chair Stephen Warren are appointed to lead the faculty steering committee that will reshape the way medical students are trained.

     

2005  

Dean Thomas Lawley continues a tradition begun by John West-moreland and followed by other deans by personally donating $150,000 toward construction of a new building to help the school revamp medical education and set a model for others to follow. Other alumni and friends, including Sid and Becky Yarbrough, UPS, Billy Jones and his family, Goodwin and Rose Helen Breinen, and John Skandalakis, make significant gifts toward the new medical education building as well.
 
     
   
 

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