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Ed Yeates ReportingA lot of memories will come together tonight as more than 500 people gather in Salt Lake to celebrate the University of Utah School of Medicine's 100th anniversary. What many said could never happen a century ago, did!
Welcome to the University of Utah school of medicine, that is where it all began back in 1905. A dream, a beginning with only 14 students in three rooms taking a two-year medical course offered by the Biology Department. A center for medicine? Some said it could never happen in an area so provincial as Salt Lake.
Chase Peterson, M.D., University of Utah Medical Student Programs: "Someone asked my predecessor, John Dixon, that question. How could it have possibly happened, what's this place made of? He said, 'moonbeams and barbed wire.' I don't know what he meant by that, but he was probably right."
But over the years a few rooms became a school with many rooms. The first hospitals were not the high tech medical center we see now spread out on Salt Lake's east side. Those early physicians, interning as M.D.'s, worked out of the old Salt Lake County Hospital on 21st South and State. Back then, that was a trauma one hospital.
But then a real medical center, complete with a hospital and research labs, was born, and it's been growing ever since.
Dr. Peterson: "We were able to hire a number of young faculty who were looking for opportunity, looking for freedom, looking for lack of restraint. And those two things came together."
Come together it did. The University is now one of the top clinical medical and research centers in the country. It captured the international spotlight when the first permanent artificial heart was implanted in Seattle Barney Clark. Dr. Chase Peterson should know. He was a major player in that historical event.
Dr. Peterson: "It was one of the first medical experiments done in public in a sense. We didn't intend it that way. Experiments are done quietly and then you publish the results, but the world took such an interest in this thing that 100 medical people from Europe and America camped on our doorstep."
Now some of the world's leading medical researchers are permanently camped out on this doorstep. Genetics, pediatrics, orthopedics, heart and cancer therapies, transplants, implants - and much more.
100 years later the theme continues more pronounced than ever.
Dr. Peterson: "It really is the discovery, the discovery of new facts, of new ways of doing things and of new ways of getting and using knowledge."
Those who've put together the gala celebration tonight call it "A Century of Brilliance." The reunion, complete with a banquet, begins at 7:00 at the downtown Marriott.
