In the early 1980s, the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) faced a difficult and momentous transition. The chairs of its departments of microbiology, anatomy, pathology and physiology had either resigned or retired. How the vacancies were filled would affect the school’s competitiveness for national science grants well into the next century. The ability of many Cleveland hospitals to attract topflight physicians also depended on the rebuilding of the medical school’s basic sciences departments, as new faculty members would hold joint hospital appointments.
The new dean of the medical school, Richard E. Behrman, looked to the Cleveland Foundation for funds to enable his new department heads to update laboratories and attract nationally regarded researchers. Behrman’s request for $3 million was three times larger than the foundation’s largest grant to date.
Acting on the advice of a team of 11 nationally known basic scientists led by cardiovascular-pulmonary specialist Alfred P. Fishman, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, the foundation agreed to support the rebuilding of CWRU’s basic sciences departments one at a time. Site reviews were to be conducted by the consultants prior to the release of funding for each successive department.
Between 1981 and 1986, the medical school received four large grants totaling $2.15 million, a foresighted investment in an institution vital to the practice of medicine locally and to the vigor of the regional economy. By the end of the 1980s, the new basic sciences faculty had attracted about $20 million in additional federal research funds, and the medical school had announced plans to build a new $78 million biomedical research center. The school’s increasing momentum had also helped to propel CWRU back into the national ranks of the top 20 private research universities.
A three-year foundation grant of $575,000 awarded to the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1988 similarly enhanced that institution’s capacity to perform advanced biomedical research. Until then, the hospital’s physicians had conducted research with a largely physiological or biochemical focus. With the foundation’s support, cardiologist Bernadine Healy, the recently arrived director of the Clinic’s research institute, created and staffed a major new department of molecular biology, making possible (among other things) research in the emerging field of genomics and gene sequencing.
The foundation’s vote of confidence in Healy’s vision empowered her. Before leaving to head the National Institutes of Health in 1991, Healy continued to broaden the Clinic’s research interests, promoted the critical place of research in the Clinic’s medical education program, and took the first steps toward relocating the Clinic’s scattered research departments into a single complex. Today, the Lerner Research Institute, which opened in 1999 with support from the Cleveland Foundation, houses 18 multidisciplinary teams in its department of cellular and molecular medicine alone.
The repositioning of the Cleveland Clinic and CWRU’s medical school at the cutting edge of biomedical research has advanced scientific knowledge and medical understanding. Valuable in its own right, the ongoing process of discovery has also been one of the engines driving Greater Cleveland’s transformation into a nationally recognized center of biomedical commercialization—a high-tech, high-growth industry cluster key to northeastern Ohio’s economic recovery and global competitiveness.