Stanford University School of Medicine

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Stanford Medical School

Stanford University School of Medicine is affiliated with Stanford University and is located at Stanford University Medical Center in Stanford, California, adjacent to Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Originally based in San Francisco, California as Cooper Medical College, the medical school moved to the Stanford Campus in 1959. Stanford is now well known for its small class size and pass/fail grading system.

Rotations occur not only at the Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard's Children hospital, but at other locations such as Kaiser, Santa Clara Valley Hospital and the Palo Alto VA which serve very distinct patient populations and increase diversity of patients and healthcare settings that students learn in. A maximum of 4 students are assigned to each hospital for any given clerkship (internal medicine, surgery, etc. ). Stanford is a cutting-edge center for translational and biomedical research (both basic science and clinical) and this emphasis on novel methods, discoveries and interventions is brought into its curriculum.

In the 2007 medical school survery, Stanford came in 7th position for research. The school's greatest contribution to the medical community is the focus on medical student research. Students apply for grants and engage in rigorous basic science research. The MD/PhD program is well run and provides students with lifelong mentors.

The school has 2 student run free medical clinics. The clinics provide medical students with additional clinical training.

In 1998, after over 15 years of compliants from students, the national agency that accredits medical schools came close to placing Stanford's School of Medicine on probation. The school received a stern letter (Feb. 17th) from Donald Kassebaum, MD, secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accrediting agency, stating that "Stanford has a fine medical school, and its graduates are splendid. [But] no school of the standing and quality and affluence of Stanford has instructional facilities that bad,". The letter went on to say that a motion to put the school on probation failed by a single vote. Ken Melmon, MD, then professor of medicine and chair of the medical school Faculty Senate, distributed data on acceptance and enrollment rates at Stanford and other top medical schools. He pointed out that when students are admitted to Stanford's medical school and to the school's prime competitors, UC San Francisco and Harvard, only 4 percent choose to attend Stanford.

In 1999, Stanford University approved a $185 million, five-year plan to improve the 40 year-old School of Medicine and to address other issues brought up by students including abuse and discrimination during their clinical rotations. However, these plans never came to fruition and the $185 million was diverted elsewhere. Three months prior to the next visit from the accrediting agency (2005) various committees were formed to help the School of Medicine pass. A group of retired members of the LCME were recruited by Oscar Salvatierra, M.D., former professor of Transplantation and Nephrology. These former members helped the school byepass the usual in-depth scrutiny. The committee on clinical training headed by Myriam Curet, M.D. Professor of general surgery, for the first time read the clerkship evaluations left by generations of medical students. Departments and residents notorious for medical student abuse were repeated warned to curtail their behavior for the upcoming LCME visit.

Although nothing has changed since the 1998 review, the medical school passed the accrediting agency visit with flying colors. The only negative mark given was to the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology for inappropriate behavior towards students. Currently, the medical school is still composed of: a set classrooms and a miniture lounge/mail room. The school's Hippocratic Oath and agreements to the Geneva Conventions were removed from the medical school and adopted by the Vaden Student Health Center. With the lack of facilities, students find alternative places to study and learn. Common study areas include: The UCSF medical library, The Stanford Law School library, The undergraduate Cecil H. Green library and Meyer library, and local cafes such as Starbucks.

In 2000, Stanford gained a new Dean. The Dean of the medical school is responsible for the medical school, the Stanford Medical Center, residency training. Due to a prior 2-year merger with the University of California San Francisco, the Stanford medical center needed to recover lost revenue. By the end of fiscal year 1999, the merged enterprise had accumulated an annual operating loss of $86 million. Of this amount, some $66 million was related to operations at UCSF, particularly at the UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center, while the remaining $20 million was associated with operations at Stanford and Packard hospitals. A $13 million investment revenue gain brought the total shortfall of the merged enterprise to $73 million for the 1999 fiscal year. The Dean applied sensible business practices to bring the medical center back in the red. The hospital's hospice program and the department of Family Medicine were cut. New contracts were drawn up for faculty and staff. Everyone in the department of student affairs was fired and rehired only if they agreed to a new contract. The specifics of the new contracts are under gag orders. With the help of yearly funds to the medical school, grants and cost cutting measures, the medical center is back in the red. The department of Family Medicine was saved due to California licensing rules mandating all graduates of a medical school to do a one month rotation in Family Practice.

New Curriculum Fall 2003

The new curriculum is a slightly modified version of an old format from 20 years ago. Classroom lectures are reduced from 30 hrs/week to 22 hrs/week. There are no classes on Wednesdays. The grading scheme is completely pass/fail and there is no AOA or other forms of an honor system as to encourage cooperation among students. Each student is assigned to 1 of 12 Scholarly concentrations/majors. The remaining 8 hrs/wk is devoted to working on these scholarly projects. Although courses are still predominantly composed of basic sciences and traditional disciplines, a strong attempt to combine individual lectures via cutting and pasting has been achieved. However due to the strength of science and research at Stanford, a true integration of clinical and organ-based lectures is difficult to implement. Students at Stanford do however learn to think and act as scientists- a unique angle in medical education.

1 Notable Research/Achievements
2 Notable Alumni
3 Notable Faculty Members
4 References in Popular Culture
5 External links

[edit] Notable Research/Achievements

1957 - Arthur Kornberg (then at Washington University) discovers the first DNA polymerase.
1968 - first heart transplant in the USA by Norman Shumway.
1970 - Leonard Herzenberg develops the fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS) which revolutionizes the study of cancer cells and will be essential for purification of adult stem cells
1973 - Berg and Cohen (and Boyer at UCSF) essentially starts the biotechnology era with developments in methods of DNA cloning
1990 - Roger Kornberg discovers the Mediator of transcriptional activation, which links gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery in all eukaryotes.
1996 - Matt Scott identifies gene for basal cell carcinoma
2006 - Roger Kornberg gets the Noble prize for reporting the structure of eukaryotic RNA polymerase II at atomic resolution, the most complex protein structure solved to date.

[edit] Notable Alumni

Irving Weissman- Leading Stem Cell Biologist. Founder of Systemix and Stem Cells Inc.
Peter Kim - President of Merck Research Laboratories
David D. Burns - Psychiatrist and author

[edit] Notable Faculty Members

Paul Berg - Biochemist. Nobel Laureate.
Patrick Brown - Developer of the microarray for the masses.
Andrew Z. Fire - Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Arthur Kornberg - Winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Severo Ochoa) for their discovery of the mechanisms of the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid.
Roger Kornberg - Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and son of Arthur Kornberg. Discoverer of nucleosome and transcriptional Mediator. Member of National Academy of Sciences.
Donald Laub - Founder of Interplast, Inc.
Joshua Lederberg - Nobel Laureate.
Kate Lorig - Director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center
Norman Shumway - Heart transplant pioneer.
Irving Weissman - Leading Stem Cell Biologist. Founder of Systemix and Stem Cells Inc.

[edit] References in Popular Culture

Dr._Cristina_Yang, a character on the popular medical television drama Grey's_anatomy is a stanford alumna and 'graduated first in her class', despite Stanford's medical school not actually having grades or rankings

[edit] External links

	Leland Stanford Junior University
Academics	School of Humanities and Sciences • School of Engineering • School of Earth Sciences • School of Education • Graduate School of Business • Stanford Law School • School of Medicine •