Research Milestones: 2003

JANUARY 2003

• Completion of the $4.5 million Gamma Knife Center at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center is marked with the “dropping” of its own New Year’s “ball,” a spherical helmet device, a key component of brain therapy combining surgery and radiation.
• Julie Freischlag, a California vascular surgeon, is named Director of the Department of Surgery at the School of Medicine and surgeon in chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is the first woman and only the sixth person to hold these posts.
• Responding to the U.S. Government’s recommendation to vaccinate volunteer “first response” health care workers against smallpox, Hopkins Medicine adopts a “low risk, go slow” approach after review of known scientific facts and consultation with experts, ethicists and colleagues.
• Howard County General Hospital opens the Center for Wound Healing, offering a comprehensive program to treat and manage patients with non-healing wounds.

 FEBRUARY 2003

• A Public Broadcasting System documentary, “Partners of the Heart,” chronicles how Vivien Thomas, an African-American lab technician with little money and only a high school diploma, worked with surgeon Alfred Blalock to help pioneer ground-breaking cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1944.
• Johns Hopkins’ popular ABX (antibiotic treatment) Guide, used on mobile communications devices and personal computers, is made available on BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds.
• Following a six-year federal government audit program—called the Physicians at Teaching Hospitals (or “PATH”) initiative—to assess Medicare billing rules compliance by faculty physicians when residents also were involved in patient care, Johns Hopkins agrees with federal authorities to settle rather than continue to spend staff time on the battle.

MARCH 2003

• Ground is broken on Johns Hopkins Medicine’s East Baltimore campus for a second cancer research building, just three years after dedication of a building devoted solely to cancer research.
• The Johns Hopkins Bayview Geriatrics Center building is renamed the John R. Burton Pavilion, honoring the former director of the Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology.

APRIL 2003

• For the 13th consecutive year, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine ranks as one of the top two medical schools in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.
• Linda Fried is named director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins, succeeding John Burton.

 MAY 2003

• Peter McDonnell, a 1982 graduate of the School of Medicine known for his expertise in diseases of the cornea and refractive surgery, is named the new director of the Wilmer Eye Institute, succeeding Morton F. Goldberg.
• The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation awards a four-year, $24 million gift to establish a multidisciplinary center focused exclusively on reducing the rate of sudden cardiac arrest.
• The Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine announces the first annual visiting professorship designed to showcase the talents of outstanding minority medical scientists and doctors.

JUNE 2003

• Ronda K. Dean, Arnold I. Richman and Thomas G. Snead Jr. are elected new members of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Board of Trustees. Brenda Erozan, president of the Women’s Board of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and David J. Gallitano, vice chairman of the Howard County General Hospital board, join the board as ex officio members. The board names Sidney Kimmel as an honorary trustee, and reelects its chairman, Lenox D. Baker Jr., M.D., and its vice chairmen, William C. Baker, Shale D. Stiller, and Francis X. Knott.
• The Johns Hopkins Hospital Board of Trustees elects James T. Dresher, Jr. as a member, and Alice Reid, first vice president of the Women’s Board of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, joins the board as an ex officio member.
• Richard L. Wahl is the first recipient of the Henry N. Wagner, Jr., M.D., Professorship in Nuclear Medicine at Johns Hopkins.
• Hopkins Medicine appoints four new vice presidents: Elaine Freeman, Vice President for Corporate Communications; Toby A. Gordon, Vice President for Strategic Planning and Market Research; Judy A. Reitz, Vice President for Quality Improvement, and Linda Robertson, Vice President for Government Affairs and Community Relations.

JULY 2003

• For the 13th consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of American hospitals places The Johns Hopkins Hospital at the top of the list.
• Theodore L. DeWeese is named the first director of the new Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Science.
• Benjamin Baker, who served as medical consultant to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and physician to H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other celebrities, dies at the age of 101.
• Carol W. Greider, internationally known for her work on telomerase, is named the first Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.
• Surgeons perform what is believed to be the world’s first “triple swap” kidney transplant operation, simultaneously giving new leases on life to a woman from Florida, a woman from Pennsylvania and a child from Maryland by exchanging kidneys provided by three living donors.
• Johns Hopkins Bayview launches Meditech, integrated, campus-wide computerized hospital information systems.
• ElderPlus, the Johns Hopkins Bayview program that cares for elderly patients who wish to remain independent and avoid relocation to a nursing home, opens Hosanna House, an assisted living facility in Edgemere, Maryland.
• US Family Health Plan, offered through Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, renews its five-year contract with the federal Department of Defense to provide comprehensive health care coverage to uniformed services beneficiaries.
• Ground is broken for a $12 million expansion of Johns Hopkins White Marsh Center, adding 40,000 square feet to provide additional space for Johns Hopkins Community Physicians’ primary care and pediatric practices, while also opening a large orthopedic suite with physical therapy and a pharmacy. Additional specialty programs also will have space in the new facility, set to open in mid-2004.

AUGUST 2003

• The Genetics and Public Policy Center, a $10 million project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, establishes a 13-member Reproductive Genetics Advisory Committee to provide expert advice on the scientific, medical, legal, social, ethical, and policy issues accompanying genetic testing, gene transfer and cloning technologies.
• Orlando DeFelice, a 48-year-old accounting professional from Phoenix, Md., celebrates the 20th anniversary of his heart transplant at Johns Hopkins.
• The School of Medicine and its McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine pool resources to become the first academic institution in the U.S. to obtain a $1.5 million commercial system capable of processing hundreds of DNA samples and determining 600,000 genotypes a day.
• The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), responding to an intern’s complaint under new work-hour rules, threatens to withdraw certification from the Department of Medicine’s internal medicine residency program.

SEPTEMBER 2003

• The Johns Hopkins University and the non-profit American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) establish the Johns Hopkins Special Collection, a constantly expanding set of biological materials such as cell lines developed at Hopkins, that will be more readily available to researchers worldwide through ATCC.
• Surgeons successfully separate 2-month-old conjoined twins from Lagos, Nigeria, who had fused livers and were joined at the abdomen and sternum.
• The Avon Foundation awards $10 million to the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center to build a new breast center, support research designed to decrease breast cancer incidence and death rates and fund education and outreach initiatives.
• The Johns Hopkins Hospital again receives the Consumer Choice Award for both the Baltimore and Washington regions from the National Research Corporation (NRC).
• Howard County General Hospital’s Diagnostic Imaging (ID) unit moves into new, renovated space as part of a $1.8 million enhancement project.
• Andrew M. Munster, M.D., director of the Baltimore Regional Burn Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview from 1976 to 2000, and a nationally acclaimed leader in burn infection research and wound care, dies on September 27.
• Bert Vogelstein of the Kimmel Cancer Center once again tops the Institute for Scientific Information’s list of the world’s 50 most influential scientists in the past 20 years, with 361 papers and 106,401 citations. The ISI’s newsletter ScienceWatch ranks director of neuroscience Solomon Snyder as the third most cited researcher and Kenneth Kinzler, co-director of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory with Vogelstein, is ranked 19th.

OCTOBER 2003

• Biological chemist Peter Agre is awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his laboratory’s 1991 discovery of aquaporins, the long-sought “channels” that regulate and facilitate water molecule transport through cell membranes. The discovery ushered in a golden age of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of these proteins.
• Scientists unveil a thorough, searchable human protein database, the online Human Protein Reference Database, with comprehensive information on 10,000 human proteins, which will change the way biology is done.
• Eileen P.G. Vining is named director of the John M. Freeman Pediatric Epilepsy Center.
• A 10-story, $140 million, 372,000-square-foot building opens to its first occupants on the East Baltimore campus, providing critical research space, as well as a new front door for the School of Medicine.
• The Office of Critical Events Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) receives federal grants totaling $3.5 million to develop plans for health system response to bioterrorism and other disasters, including infectious disease outbreaks.
• Stephen Desiderio is named director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, succeeding Jeremy Berg.
• Johns Hopkins Bayview’s pulmonary rehabilitation program receives certification from the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation.
• Johns Hopkins Bayview Geriatrics Center is renamed the Johns Hopkins Bayview Care Center, reflecting the broad range of continuing care services there that expand beyond the center’s nursing home origins.

NOVEMBER 2003

• Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) of Singapore establish the Johns Hopkins Medicine Division of Biomedical Science in Singapore, the first full division JHM has created outside of Baltimore.
• The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Department of Nursing earns the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) highest honor, “Magnet” status, making Hopkins Hospital the first in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Delaware to achieve it.

DECEMBER 2003

• Lloyd B. Minor is named the new Andelot Professor and Director of the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins, succeeding Charles W. Cummings.
• The Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine’s internal medicine residency program receives full accreditation for three years from the Residency Review Committee for Internal Medicine (RRC-IM) of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), reversing an earlier finding.
• James E. Young is named Senior Vice President of Finance/Chief Financial Officer at Howard County General Hospital.
• Howard County General Hospital physicians deliver a record 3,451 babies in 2003, more than 10 percent above the number delivered in 2002.
• Johns Hopkins Bayview successfully completes its review by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO).