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Baylor College of Medicine in Houston65 years of Excellenceby Dana Benson 
William T. Butler, M.D. Baylor College of Medicine celebrated its centennial year in 2000, but 2008 marks another significant milestone for the school—65 years in Houston. Though it occasions less fanfare, the anniversary is significant because in those six and one-half decades, BCM has reached the top tier of medical and graduate schools in the United States. Houston and its community have played a major role in making that achievement possible. "There has always been a strong relationship between Baylor and the Houston community, and it started very early," said William Butler, M.D., BCM's second President from 1979 to 1996. Now serving as Interim President, as well as Chancellor Emeritus, Butler is also Baylor College of Medicine's resident historian. 
Walter Moursund, M.D. The move to Houston from Dallas was clearly an important event in 1943. The M. D. Anderson Foundation had decided to use its funds to build a medical center in Houston. It needed a medical school as an anchor, and when Baylor clashed with civic leaders in Dallas, the Foundation offered the school $1 million to pay for a building in the hoped-for medical center and $100,000 each year for 10 years to support research. Baylor University—with which BCM was affiliated at the time—and the medical school leadership accepted in 1943, in the middle of World War II. The determination to come to Houston was obvious because the move was successful, even though the war posed logistical problems. For example, gasoline was rationed at the time. 
Stanley Olson, M.D. The move also placed members of the faculty and student body under considerable stress. Only six faculty members moved with the medical school. As students took their exams in Dallas, they were told that they would go to school the next year in Houston—if they elected to stay at Baylor. "The faculty members who decided to stay in Dallas actively sought the students to stay there. There was a lot of tug of war," Butler said. "The students talk about the fact that faculty would burst into the classroom and—not threaten them exactly—but basically say there's nothing in Houston, you should stay here in Dallas." Many students who made the move were in Army and Navy programs that paid for their education, and they were essentially ordered to Houston. Once in the Bayou City, they found their accommodations much different from those in Dallas. For the first three years, they attended classes in an empty Sears, Roebuck and Co. building on Allen Parkway near downtown Houston. Wartime restrictions on building materials, among other things, delayed construction of a new building in the fledgling Texas Medical Center. 
Baylor College of Medicine, 1947 The Roy and Lillie Cullen Building opened in 1947 and was dedicated in 1948. The first new construction in the Texas Medical Center, it reflected the support the Houston community has consistently shown Baylor College of Medicine. When the $1 million the M. D. Anderson Foundation pledged toward the building fell short of escalating post-war building costs, the newly established Cullen Foundation gave an additional $800,000 to finish and equip it. 
Michael E. DeBakey, M.D. The next major event in Baylor's Houston history was the hiring of Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., as Chair of the Department of Surgery in 1948. Dean Walter Moursund recruited him and several other key members of that early faculty. They formed not only the educational backbone of the school, but also the core of its basic and clinical science component. They were visionaries in many ways, but they were also risk-takers. Baylor College of Medicine's success and survival were not assured at that time. "For the most part, I think they saw the vision of what could be accomplished with the resources that they were given and with the help of a community that wanted to build something," Butler said. "They weren't restricted like they would be in Boston or New York or Philadelphia, where it was pretty well developed." 
Salih Wakil, Ph.D. The surgical discoveries of DeBakey and his colleagues were very important to the development of Baylor College of Medicine, because they began to draw attention to the medical center nationally and internationally. Soon Baylor came to be known as the center for heart treatment, and DeBakey was its leader. With Baylor now on the map, many leaders at the school and in the community began to realize the institution could not reach its potential as long as it was associated with Baylor University in Waco, a Baptist school that could not receive state or certain federal funding. There were ways of skirting this issue. For example, when Dean Stanley Olson was prohibited from applying for a federal grant to construct M.D. Anderson and Jesse Jones Halls to increase the College's lab and teaching space, he arranged for the Texas Medical Center to apply for the funds and construct the buildings on property leased to TMC by Baylor. 
Arthur Beaudet, M.D. Plans like that would not work long-term, though. With the support of the local community and Baylor University President Abner McCall, the medical school separated from the University in 1969. DeBakey, who had been serving as Chief Executive Officer, was named the first President of Baylor College of Medicine. The events were pivotal in the school's history and were soon followed by an effort to obtain appropriations from the Texas state Legislature that would double the student body at a time when more doctors were needed, especially in rural parts of the state. Enrollment increased from 84 to 168, with most of the new enrollees Texas residents. As a result, the student body went from two-thirds non-Texans to a majority of students hailing from the Lone Star State, a trend that continues today. 
Robert Couch, M.D. With the student body established and Baylor's role in the community stable, the 1970s was a period of quiet growth for the basic sciences faculty and the clinical component. "One of Dr. DeBakey's strongest themes was that in a true academic health center, you have to integrate teaching, research and patient care. You can't separate them, and they've got to be under unified control," Butler said. DeBakey was also insistent that the College make new inroads in developing its own pipeline of medical and graduate students, giving opportunities to groups who had never considered medical school before. 
Vernon Knight, M.D. As part of that vision, Baylor and the Houston Independent School District opened the first High School for Health Professions in the nation in 1972. The school, now named the Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions, was designed to give students from ethnic and racial minorities the secondary education they needed to attend college and ultimately medical school or graduate school in the biomedical sciences. The College later established similar programs at six high schools in the Rio Grande Valley to extend similar opportunities to Hispanic students there. Ten DeBakey graduates each year enter the Houston Premedical Academy, which enables them to go to the University of Houston and then enter Baylor College of Medicine as long as they meet certain academic requirements. The Premedical Honors Academy is a similar joint effort between BCM and The University of Texas-Pan American. 
James Phillips, M.D. Even while establishing a pipeline for future students, BCM's leaders of the 1970s focused on improving its own research program. Among those recruited were Bert O'Malley, M.D., and Salih Wakil, Ph.D., who went on to become the first two members of the National Academy of Sciences from BCM. Others recruited to BCM during this period included Vernon Knight, M.D., Robert Couch, M.D., and Butler. Ralph Feigin, M.D., came to Baylor in 1977 as the Chair of Pediatrics and took the department to new heights. In 1996, he became BCM's third President. "We had a slow evolution of both the basic science component and the clinical component, but by the mid-1970s, they began to take off, and this allowed us to concentrate on what we needed to do to become preeminent in the next century," said Butler. He led the College during much of this building period. 
Bert O'Malley, M.D. A strategic planning process called Research 2000 during the 1980s brought together faculty from throughout the College along with external consultants to identify areas in which BCM had to excel in order to achieve recognition as one of the nation's top 10 medical schools. BCM has grown to lead in those areas of science that include structural biology, molecular virology, molecular and cellular biology, vascular biology, neurosciences and genetics. "The development of what became the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics was probably the most important from the standpoint of leading in the next century, and it certainly has proved to be one of most valuable assets at this school," Butler said. 
Ralph D. Feigin, M.D. Thomas Caskey, M.D., came from the National Institutes of Health to the Department of Medicine in 1972 to lead a section on medical genetics. He was soon joined by Arthur Beaudet, M.D, in pediatrics, and together they set about building an outstanding program in genetics. The College established the department in 1994. It is currently led by Beaudet. The program started small but soon flourished with the recruitment of top-notch faculty and its prominent role in the Human Genome Project. "Today, I think that as far as human genetics departments in medical schools, it's in the top five and some say it is number one," Beaudet said in the book, The Quest for Excellence, which commemorated BCM's centennial. He commented that it was the collaborative approach that allowed science to flourish at BCM. 
Janet Butel, Ph.D. The 1980s under Butler's leadership represented a period of scientific maturation for BCM. That prompted a modernization in curriculum, led by Feigin, who was then Dean of Medical Education. In the 1980s, BCM began to look to the future in other ways, and women and members of ethnic and racial minorities achieved new firsts at the school. The leadership of James L. Phillips, M.D., Senior Associate Dean at BCM, has been instrumental in recruiting and retaining students from racial and ethnic minorities at the College. He also has been instrumental in working with middle and high school students interested in a medical education. In 1989, Janet Butel, Ph.D., who received her doctorate from BCM, was appointed Head of the Division of Molecular Virology and its Chair in 1999, when it was made the Department of Molecular Virology & Microbiology. She leads the College's Center for AIDS Research and was the first woman appointed to an endowed professorship, the first to be named a Distinguished Service Professor and the first female department chair. Susan Hamilton, Ph.D., became Chair of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics in 2004. 
Susan Hamilton, Ph.D. While the College has been honing its research credentials, it has also been forging a new path clinically. The promise of personalized medicine combined with BCM's leadership in gene sequencing efforts has generated new projects that promise to change the face of medicine in Houston and the United States. "I think the most recent major event in the history of BCM is the development of the Baylor Clinic and Hospital," Butler said. "It's going to be a turning point in the history of the school." 
Stephen J. Spann, M.D. Baylor College of Medicine's can-do attitude will flourish under the leadership of Hamilton, newly named Senior Vice President and Dean of Research, and Stephen J. Spann, M.D., Chair of Family and Community Medicine and newly named Senior Vice President and Dean of Clinical Affairs, said Butler. "I do think members of our faculty are still visionaries, but they don't see themselves on the frontier like they did in 1943 when there was nothing here and the vision was to create something that didn't exist," he noted. "Instead, the vision today is how can we treat this disease, how can we discover how something happens in a disease that makes a person sick? These are the visions that drive Baylor College of Medicine today." 
Baylor College of Medicine, 2007 |
FeaturesBaylor College of Medicine in Houston: 65 years of Excellence BCM Looks to the Future on the McNair Campus Legacy of Leadership: BCM Icons Set Foundation for the Future 1,000 Genomes Project: Looking for the Differences NewsO'Malley Receives National Medal of Science Robert Todd Named to Lead BCM's Department of Medicine Roy Huffington Remembered as Bold and Generous SpotlightFollowing his Passion—One Physician's Journey When Two Degrees are Better Than One: M.D. - M.P.H. Thomas Street—The Road to Health Perceiving—A new Look at Brain and Behavior BriefsGenetics Used to Personalize Heart Disease Treatment First Drug for Huntington's Disease Eye Problems from Pain Free Migraines Genetic Insights into Deadly Brain Tumor Made-to-Order Weapon in the Fight Against Childhood Cancer BCM Joins Largest Children's Study Development/AlumniGifts Help Restore Sight to Patients with Corneal Damage Alums Start Careers, Life Together at BCM Development BriefsCharitable Gifts Lead to National Recognition Trustee Chuck Watson Makes Unique Gift
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Volume 4, Issue 3, Winter 2008 |
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| Last modified: December 23, 2008 |