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Medical
school shows
a changing face
As the Congress Avenue Building
nears completion, a flurry of smaller projects alters the campus scene.
Before suburbs lured people from cities and Route 34 drove a wedge through
downtown New Haven, the neighborhood surrounding the medical school bustled
with businesses, shops and restaurants. In recent years, however, campus
buildings have offered a stern face to the outside world, uninviting to
those not practicing or studying medicine or seeking medical attention.
Now, as a number of construction
projects near completion, the medical school campus is undergoing a major
facelift. At the corner of Cedar Street and Congress Avenue, buildings
which for years were open only to those bearing a Yale or hospital ID
now include two stores catering to the public—the Yale Medical Bookstore
and Cappuccino’s & More, a gourmet coffee shop.
“With the opening of
the Congress Avenue Building [CAB], the school’s center of gravity
will start to shift down Cedar Street,” said Irwin M. Birnbaum, J.D.,
the medical school’s chief operating officer. The corner of Cedar
and Congress, he added, “is a place that is convenient to all. By
adding a bookstore and coffee shop we are recognizing the importance of
having facilities near the cab that will be more convenient for our staff
there.”
Cappuccino’s & More,
which opened in January, has seating for 32 with counter and takeout service.
The Yale Medical Bookstore, affiliated with the Barnes & Noble bookstore
on Broadway in New Haven, opened in October to replace the Yale Co-op’s
medical branch on York Street, which closed last year. The bookstore caters
largely to medical students and professionals, but manager Don Levy said
many patients come straight from doctor’s visits to look for books
describing their ailments. Also available are stethoscopes, tuning forks,
scrubs and study guides.
Among the major projects under
way:
At the site of the 457,000-square-foot
Congress Avenue Building, scheduled to open in March 2003, workers have
enclosed the building and begun to install plumbing, electrical wiring,
HVAC, partitions, shelves, benches and other laboratory casework.
At the end of the B wing in
the Sterling Hall of Medicine (SHM), construction began in March 2001
on the Center for Drug Discovery, a three-story addition that will provide
25,000 gross square feet of wet-bench laboratory, laboratory support and
office space. Renovations to the B wing will provide an additional 24,000
square feet of upgraded office, laboratory and support space for the Department
of Pharmacology.
A full renovation of the second
floor of the C wing, home to cell biology in SHM, began in October and
is scheduled for completion in August. About 15,000 square feet will be
reorganized into four laboratory modules, along with faculty offices and
laboratory support spaces.
Construction is under way
at the corner of Amistad and Cedar streets on a 110,000-square-foot building
and garage, with six floors devoted to disease-based clinical services
and 950 parking spaces.
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With
director’s passing, Child Study Center finds itself at a crossroads
In 1972, Albert J. Solnit,
M.D., HS ’52, Seymour L. Lustman, Ph.D., M.D., HS ’57, FW ’58,
and Edward F. Zigler, Ph.D., sat down with a recent graduate of the School
of Medicine and made a pitch for him to return to Yale to join the faculty.
Solnit was then director of the Yale Child Study Center, Lustman was a
professor, and Zigler, a founder of the Head Start Program, was returning
to Yale after two years as head of the federal Office of Child Development
and U.S. Children’s Bureau.
The new recruit was Donald
J. Cohen, M.D. ’66, who accepted the offer and moved his young family
to New Haven from Washington, where he had been Zigler’s special
assistant. Cohen was the kind of scholar that Solnit, Zigler and Lustman
thought would thrive in the rich intellectual setting of the Child Study
Center. “Donald had a brilliant understanding of the biochemistry
and genetics of child development, and at the same time he was becoming
a psychoanalyst and a talented child psychiatrist,” recalled Solnit.
Cohen, who succeeded Solnit to become the center’s fourth director
in 1983, went on to build it into an academic and clinical powerhouse
with special strengths in the research and treatment of autism, obsessive-compulsive
disorder and Tourette’s syndrome, the psychological problems of children
exposed to violence, and the developmental disorders of early childhood.
Cohen died October 2 at the
age of 61, less than two years after being diagnosed with ocular melanoma.
“His death was tragic and it was horribly premature. As a healer,
as a scientist and as a leader, he is not a person who can be replaced,”
said Dean David A. Kessler, M.D. Yet during the months and years before
his death, Cohen did much to pave the way for his own successor through
recruitment and fund-raising, according to James F. Leckman, M.D., the center’s
director of research and Neison Harris Professor. “Donald left us
in really superb condition.”
Kessler said it is likely
that a new director will be named early this year.
The Child Study Center traces
its roots to 1911, when Arnold Gesell, Ph.D., M.D. ’15, established
what would become the Yale Child Development Clinic. It was renamed the
Child Study Center in 1948 with the arrival of the second director, Milton
J.E. Senn, M.D., who recruited Solnit and others interested in child psychoanalysis
and the role emotions play in healthy development. When Solnit became
director in 1966, he began applying knowledge of child development to
aspects of childhood that had been considered beyond the sphere of medicine.
The center created a network of nursery schools and, through the work
of Zigler and James P. Comer, M.D., HS ’66, began exploring ways
to work with school systems to enrich the lives of children beyond academics.
Solnit also established programs to help children in the juvenile justice
system.
During his years as director,
Cohen not only created vigorous research and clinical programs but also
became skilled at building the center’s resources. At the suggestion
of Irving Harris, a Yale alumnus and benefactor, he formed the Associates
of the Child Study Center, a national group of highly motivated volunteers
that numbers 160 today. Harris and his brother Neison endowed five professorships
and the center’s recent 21,000-square-foot addition between Sterling
Hall of Medicine and Harkness Dormitory. “Donald engaged the associates
as our consultants and colleagues,” said Linda C. Mayes, M.D., the
center’s Arnold Gesell Professor. “Some of our finest work has
come from those collaborations.”
Maintaining the center’s
preeminence will be one of the challenges facing the next director, said
Mayes. Another will be preserving the collegial environment of the center
as it continues to grow. But perhaps most important for the next leader,
said Solnit, will be making his or her own distinct imprint. “The
blueprint that Donald set out will continue to maintain its momentum,”
he said, “but the new director will have to resist the temptation
to try to be like Donald. The new director, as Donald himself was, will
have to be his own person.”
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Instrument
shop endures as a place for repairs, a catalyst for creativity
Tucked into
the basement of the Hope Building at the corner of Congress Avenue and
Cedar Street is a warren of well-lit rooms filled with milling machines,
table saws, welders and lathes—a place where a scientist in need
can go for a centrifuge repair or a part for a pH meter. The Instrument
Repair and Design Shop has catered to medical school researchers for
more than three decades, building prototype devices for use in experiments
and performing emergency repairs on equipment that fails.
It’s a
distinguished history that almost came to an end. According to faculty
member Vinzenz M. Unger, Ph.D., the staff provides researchers with
essential technology not commercially available elsewhere. Yet years
of running in the red threatened the shop’s existence, and in 2000
it appeared to be on its last legs.
That was before
a hue and cry arose from faculty members who had come to appreciate
the instrument shop not only as a provider of engineering services but
also as a catalyst for intellectual creativity and innovation—something
difficult to measure in terms of profitability.
Faculty advisors
Robert H. LaMotte, Ph.D., and Kenneth R. Williams, Ph.D., worked with
administrators and the shop staff to find a solution. Shop engineers
James F. Hogan and Eugene J. Modzelewski streamlined existing services,
reconfigured the fee schedule and developed a marketing plan to increase
the instrument shop’s customer base.
Now, said Carol
S. Marshall, the school’s director of training and quality improvement,
the shop is in the black for the first time in seven years. The key
to balancing the books, she said, was increasing the shop’s visibility
and encouraging an entrepreneurial approach to the shop’s business.
Hogan and Modzelewski
perform many services, from such mundane tasks as ordering specialized
plastics and repairing Geiger counters to talking through experiments
with researchers and planning the design and fabrication of delicate
laboratory instruments. Hogan has been tinkering with designs for Yale
researchers for 40 years, initially working with the Department of Surgery
in the design of pacemakers before joining the instrument shop staff
in 1985. Trained as an electrical engineer, he said that his real education
has come on the job while listening to the needs of researchers.
One of their
recent projects was a “heart phantom” developed for researchers
in the Department of Internal Medicine, with six progressively smaller
chambers of Plexiglas sitting one within the other. The distance between
chambers simulates the thickness of the myocardium during a contraction,
allowing researchers to take measurements critical to their work.
Hogan and Modzelewski
took the project from a series of discussions and paper sketches to
a model on the computer screen to the eight-inch Plexiglas prototype
sitting on the table when a visitor toured the shop recently. Hogan
lifted the heart phantom, demonstrated the way the top seals two outer
chambers in a vacuum and pointed out how the four remaining inner chambers
would fit inside each other. “It’s like being an artist,”
Modzelewski agreed. “We see how the pieces of the problem connect
the way an artist sees color, and it all comes together.”
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Overcoming
jitters of 9/11, Yale celebrates 300 years and a global future
On September
11, when terror struck the nation and America’s mood suddenly turned
somber, less than a month remained in Yale’s Tercentennial year.
The final weekend in the University’s 12-month observance of its
300th anniversary had been planned for October 5 and 6, two days of
festive celebration and academic ceremony. But in the days that followed
the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, University leaders
debated the wisdom of staging the Tercentennial finale in the Yale Bowl.
Was it safe? Was it appropriate? Would people come?
“Carry
on,” was the message President Richard C. Levin said he received
from the Yale community, Levin told 30,000 people gathered in the Yale
Bowl on October 5. The crowd had come for a multimedia spectacular featuring
famous Yale alumni celebrating Yale’s contribution to the nation
and the world. With that, a 150-member orchestra played and a 200-member
chorus, along with the audience, sang “America the Beautiful,”
and the celebration continued.
Security was
dramatically tightened for events that included a pomp-filled Tercentennial
Convocation on Cross Campus and a two-day symposium, “Democratic
Vistas, Global Perspectives,” with talks by Yale faculty members,
law school graduate and former President Bill Clinton and former President
of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo, who holds a doctorate in economics from Yale
and serves as a University trustee.
With Yale emphasizing
its role as a world university in its fourth century, the School of
Medicine figured prominently throughout the Tercentennial year because
of the growing awareness of the global nature of public health concerns
and the enormous impact of medical research advances on individuals
and societies. In President Levin’s Tercentennial address at the
convocation on October 5, he said, “Through the subjects and students
we teach and the educational and research collaborations we undertake
abroad, we can advance greater understanding among the world’s
peoples. We can also contribute to the solution of problems that cannot
be contained within national borders—such as the spread of disease.”
In his talk
before 8,000 people gathered on Cross Campus the following day, Clinton
noted the phenomenal improvements in health care and life expectancy
made possible by biomedical advances. He contrasted that progress in
the developed world with the abysmal health care and short life expectancy
seen in underdeveloped nations, which result in the rapid spread of
disease and political instability. That is why, he said, “Yale’s
mission to build a truly global university is so very important”
in this new century that will be marked by increasing interdependence
among nations.
In his speech,
President Levin noted Yale’s commitment to invest nearly $1 billion
in the coming decade in medicine, science and engineering facilities.
“No investment,” he said, “... holds greater promise
for the health and prosperity of the nation and the planet.” And
as a result of world events, Yale’s course for its next century
has never been more clearly tied to a global future.
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Funding
the hunt for proteins
Yale scientists have received
a $15 million, five-year grant that will fund a search for key regulatory
proteins in the human genome. The grant from the National Human Genome
Research Institute will create the Center of Excellence in Genomic Science,
to be headed by Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor and chair of molecular,
cellular and developmental biology. “Much of the human genome is
comprised of DNA whose function is not known,” Snyder said. “Our
team’s methods will elucidate the functions of many of these regions
for the first time, and as a result of these studies, we will emerge with
a much more detailed understanding of the human genome and its regulation.”
Other investigators at the center are Mark B. Gerstein, Ph.D.; Richard
P. Lifton, M.D., Ph.D.; Perry L. Miller, M.D., Ph.D.; and Sherman M. Weissman,
M.D.
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Discovery
channel taps YSM
When the breakthrough cancer
drug Gleevec made headlines, Yale Cancer Center Director Vincent T. DeVita
Jr., M.D., HS ’66, was on hand (and online) to share his perspective
with Web surfers at discoveryhealth.com. When the threat of bioterrorism
put the nation on edge, infectious disease expert Andre N. Sofair, M.D.,
M.P.H. ’97, HS ’90, weighed in with “10 Things You Need
to Know About Anthrax.” Both pieces grew from a new partnership between
Yale and the Discovery Health Channel, which will draw on expertise from
throughout the medical school. Faculty will also contribute to four, hour-long
television programs and to three online columns: “Family Matters,”
“Cutting Edge Medicine” and “Views on Health News.”
The first cable special, about ADHD, will air later this year.
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