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Fifty Years of Service and Saving Lives

(Time line compiled by Wendy Soderburg)

	Begun in 1951, the UCLA Medical Center starts to resemble the familiar building we know today by July 1953. When the $21-million facility admits its first patients in July 1955, the Los Angeles Times heralds the opening of the “atom era” hospital, equipped with the first atomic reactor designed for medical purposes.
	Admitted on July 7, 1955, Frederic Stoetzel, 72, is the medical center’s first surgical patient.
	Santa Claus cheers pediatric patients in the mid-’50s. Among the visitors is volunteer Nancy Reagan (third from the right), a member of UCLA’s Medical Center Auxiliary.
	In 1976, Michael Phelps, inventor of the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, brings his expertise to UCLA’s Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology and builds the leading PET program in the world. In the 1980s, UCLA Medical Center becomes the first to provide clinical PET scan services.
	In 1981, the world’s first case of AIDS is discovered when UCLA immunologist Michael Gottlieb sends a researcher to prowl the wards of the medical center for interesting teaching cases. The researcher returns with word that a young gay man has been hospitalized with unexplained fevers and weight loss.
	In 1992, UCLA surgeon Hillel Laks pioneers the country’s first Alternative Heart Transplant Program and is the first U.S. cardiac surgeon to perform bypass surgery on a donor heart prior to transplantation.
	In 2002, a team of more than 50 UCLA doctors, nurses and technicians, led by surgeons Jorge Lazareff and Henry Kawamoto, successfully separates 1-year-old craniopagus twin girls from Guatemala in a 22-hour surgery.
	In March 2005, the medical center becomes the world’s first hospital to use remote-presence robots in its neurosurgery intensive care unit. RONI (Robot of the Neuro ICU) is the alter ego of Neil Martin, chief of neurosurgery, who talks to patients via RONI’s monitor head.
	The Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, scheduled to open in 2007, will help ensure that UCLA continues to meet the community’s needs for the next half-century.

Party with a purpose

by wendy soderburg
today staff writer

Behind all the revelry at the Sept. 15 party on the top level of the CHS parking lot was a serious intent: to thank employees for 50 years of dedication and service at the UCLA Medical Center. Roughly 4,000 medical center employees — from housekeeping staff to surgeons — dropped by to eat, drink and play games such as “Malpractice” (a giant version of “Operation”).

Gerald S. Levey, dean of the medical school, was joined by Chancellor Albert Carnesale, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and UCLA Hospital System CEO David Callender in praising employees for helping to make the medical center great.

The most poignant messages came from two former patients: Beverly Hargreaves Billey, a UCLA graduate who became one of the medical center’s first heart-surgery patients in 1955, and Brian Hinsley, a Los Angeles County firefighter who underwent a liver transplant here.

Told by her doctors that she probably wouldn’t live beyond 40 and that having children would be risky, Billey beamed as she talked about her three grown daughters and two grandchildren, one of whom, Eric, a UCLA freshman, was at the party. Hinsley brought lumps to the throats of many when he acknowledged surgeon Ronald Busuttil, “the man who saved my life,” and all the hospital employees.

“You may not get a thank you every day from all of us, but I’m here to say right now, thank you to all of you who support this wonderful facility,” Hinsley said. “In doing so, you support me; you allow me to continue to live a long, healthy, fun, exciting life that I wouldn’t have if it were not for every person here today.”