Much like this year’s graduating seniors, the David Geffen
School of Medicine and the UCLA Medical Center have gone through
many changes in the past four years, from the renaming of the
medical school to the closing of the Willed Body Program.
The majority of seniors may remember from their freshmen year
the beginning stages of construction of a large building on Le
Conte Avenue and Westwood Boulevard.
Construction started in 2000 for the $1.2 billion Ronald Reagan
UCLA Medical Center, which will open in 2005.
The new hospital, which will house state-of-the-art facilities
and technology, was named after the recently deceased former
president shortly after the hospital’s groundbreaking
ceremony.
“(The new medical center) will also be extraordinarily
comforting to patients with its design that features a great deal
of light,” said Gerald Levey, dean of the medical school.
The David Geffen School of Medicine was not always named after
the famous entertainment figure, and the renaming was a result of a
generous gift to the school.
Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, donated $200 million to
the medical school in May 2002, making it the the largest amount
given to any medical school in the country.
The gift is also the largest given to the University of
California system and, as a result, the medical school was renamed
shortly after.
“The greatest impact (of the gift) is … it secured the
ability of the medical school to recruit, provide scholarship money
and start new programs over the decade,” Levey said.
Because the gift is unrestricted, funding is not specifically
assigned to a certain field of research and can be used in a
variety of ways, for which many are thankful.
“The gift has served as a great source of comfort that
someone has provided enough resources to ensure that we’ll be
one of top medical schools in the world,” Levey said.
The world’s attention turned to medical center surgeons in
August 2003 as they changed the lives of two girls from Guatemala
months after the medical school’s renaming.
Health care professionals, from neurosurgeons to reconstructive
surgeons, separated Maria Teresa and Maria de Jesus Quiej Alvarez,
twins conjoined at the head.
Craniopagus twins, the rarest type of conjoined twins, make up 2
percent of total conjoined twin instances. It is less common to
separate them due to the risks involved.
While the operation would have normally cost $1.5 million, UCLA
performed the operation for free at the insistence of lead
neurosurgeon Jorge Lazareff.
Lazareff regularly keeps in touch with the two girls, who will
be turning 3 years old this July.
“I still feel there is a long way for them to live up to
their potential,” Lazareff said. “Daily, they are
learning more and more things, and marveling all of us who care for
them.”
Despite the attention given to the twins and their ordeal,
Lazareff views the separation surgery as just one of hundreds he
has performed.
“I do not consider (the twins) to be different from any
other patients I’ve had the privilege of treating,”
Lazareff said.
In 2002, the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional
Technology opened, becoming one of the first facilities to use new
technology of robotic surgery that fine-tunes a surgeon’s
movements.
Doctors control the machine’s robot arms to conduct
surgery with a minimal number of incisions, reducing the risk of
complications and the length of recovery time.
Despite the advantages, patients tend to be wary of the
machines, said Joe Hines, associate professor of surgery.
“(Patients) want a person operating on them, not a
machine,” Hines said.
However, the machines have seen some use, usually in urological
or cardiac surgery, he said.
The machines make what doctors call “telemedicine”
possible, and could allow for surgeons to train, or even conduct
surgery, from far away.
Though the medical school has proven itself to be on the cutting
edge of medicine, it has also had its share of trouble.
The medical school’s Willed Body Program faced scandal
last March when Henry Reid, the director of the program, was
suspected of selling body parts from donated cadavers for personal
profit.
The program, established the same year as the medical school in
1950, ceased operations shortly after the discovery.
The possibility of not having a willed body program in the
future is not a problem for some.
“If we can’t do a willed body program right, we
won’t have a willed body program at all,” Levey
said.
It is not expected that the fiasco will affect the medical
school’s prestige.
“In the long term, I don’t think (the cadaver
scandal) will have any effect on the medical school
whatsoever,” Levey said.
Things are looking bright for the medical school and the medical
center, which has been selected as the best hospital in the western
part of the nation by U.S. News for 14 consecutive years.
“Despite all of the troubles that have plagued the country
and the state, our school has continued to perform at the highest
level,” Levey said.