West Coast History of Science Society Meeting
University of California, San Francisco
April 11th - April 14th, 2002
[Program]
Starting up a Science-based Medicine: Instrumentation of Radiation Therapy and the Formation of Stanford University Medical Centre, 1952 -1970
Takahiro Ueyama
Sophia University, Tokyo, and Stanford UniversityStanford University is today a world famous scientific medical centre. Its fame, however, is fairly new. Even after WWII Stanford University Hospital was just one of the medical institutions providing health care practices to the San Francisco community. The big change occurred in 1959 when Stanford moved its hospital to its Palo Alto campus. Working with Stanford's president, Wallace Sterling, and its provost, Frederick Terman, Henry Kaplan, a professor of radiology and ambitious medical entrepreneur, was a key person to support this move within the School of Medicine and realize the transformation of Stanford into an enhanced scientific medical centre. In 1953 Kaplan started to develop an electron-smashing machine (clinacs), the medical linear accelerator, collaborating with Edward Ginzton, the head of the Microwave laboratory and a group of nuclear physicists of Stanford Hansen Laboratory. Desiring more research-oriented collaboration with other scientists and engineers of Stanford, Kaplan saw this move as a decisive opportunity to transform the Stanford School of Medicine into a more science-based medical centre. After WWII, and in particular from the 1950s onward, American medicine began to rely heavily upon pre-clinical examinations carried out by laboratory technologies requiring the collaboration of such other scientific fields as physics, biology and chemistry. Biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics began to be seen as having an important contribution to make to medical care. In this paper, I will trace the history of clinacs from their development in the Stanford Radiology Department and also relate Kaplan's ambition to Stanford's establishment of basic medical departments such as Genetics and Biochemistry in the late 1950s. I will investigate government funding of these departments and professors using the financial data of Stanford University. From such documentation of the research funds medical professors obtained from NSF and NIH, I will show their strategy to shape the university hospital into multi-disciplinary filed dominated by purely scientific endeavors.