President Harper sought the best men and facilities to support a full complement of scientific programs for the new university. Laboratories, greenhouses, and museums were constructed on the quadrangles, but they were never expected to be large enough to house the activities of University of Chicago scientists. Biologists spent summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; botanists trekked through the lakeshore dunes north and south of Chicago. Bacteriologist Henry Taylor Ricketts travelled to Montana and Mexico to find the source of spotted fever and typhus; geologist J Harlen Bretz toured the Northwest to discover the origins of the Grand Coulee formation. James Henry Breasted studied the archeology of the Near East while Frederick Starr took notes on religious customs and symbols as he made a pilgrimage of the 88 temples of Shikoku in Japan.
Although the University of Chicago's Physics Department was well known through the work of Albert A. Michelson, Robert A. Millikan, Arthur Holly Compton, and others, the news which broke after atomic bombs fell on Japan in August 1945 brought the University's scientists to new prominence. There could be no hiding the fact that an international team of physicists and engineers had been assembled on campus early in 1942 for top-secret research; but the announcement that Enrico Fermi and his group had built a nuclear pile and successfully initiated the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, under the football stands, in the heart of the city, stunned even the faculty members who had eaten lunch every day with the physicists in the Quadrangle Club. [ See related exhibition text: The Chain Reaction: December 2, 1942 and After ].
The nuclear pile was planned for a site in the Cook County Forest Preserve, but a construction workers' strike and severe time constraints forced the group to build it on campus. Although the scientists were convinced their safety precautions were adequate, project director Compton wrote later, "I should have taken the matter to my superior. But that would have been unfair. President Hutchins was in no position to judge the hazards involved. Based on considerations of the University's welfare, the only answer he could have given would have been--no. And this answer would have been wrong."
Work accelerated in October 1942 as problems with equipment and obtaining pure materials were solved one by one. Orders with "double X priority" for graphite, uranium oxide, lumber for scaffolding, and a huge square balloon from Goodyear arrived at the Ellis Avenue laboratory with no questions asked. Youths from the Back of the Yards neighborhood were recruited to assist physics students to machine 400 tons of graphite into bricks and press uranium oxide into 22,000 small spheres.
The Manhattan Project marked a shift in scientific research from privately-supported research of individual professors, to massive team projects requiring expensive equipment, sponsored directly by the government. The experience gained in managing huge contracts during the war led to continued cooperation between the government and the University for scientific research and training in subsequent years. Construction soon began on Argonne National Laboratory, built by the government and operated by the University, to continue experiments with new types of nuclear reactors and technology. The University had chosen a farmland site in Du Page County, and soon the sleepy rural villages of Lemont and Downers Grove experienced a boom as scientists, technicians, and other employees sought housing and services close to their work.
While nuclear research under government sponsorship moved to the suburbs, the University sought industry and corporate support to build facilities for basic research on campus. The Enrico Fermi Institute and James Franck Institute were outgrowths of efforts in the 1950s to expand facilities and spur research in areas which would eventually be of use to industry and business. Medical uses of radioactive isotopes were explored in the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital on Ellis Avenue. With funding from NASA, the University built the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research, which provided facilities for University research connected to NASA's space flights.
When government support declined in the 1980s, the University sought better means to connect the long-term goals of its research programs with the needs of businesses and industries which could benefit from its discoveries. A closer relationship needed to be developed with the commercial dissemination of products and processes derived from laboratory investigations. In 1986 ARCH was created--the Argonne National Laboratory-University of Chicago Development Corporation--to assist in moving scientific discoveries from research laboratories to the marketplace. ARCH coordinated the development of industrial applications from scientific research and, with support from the Graduate School of Business, assisted with venture capital, marketing strategies, and management for commercial spin-offs.
By the time the University of Chicago opened in 1892, medicine was finally becoming a modern profession as well as a science. Most medical schools were still privately run, usually by a group of physicians as an extra source of income. As understanding of germ theory and the use of anesthesia spread, medicine became better grounded in scientific principles, and medical research was taken up by universities. The medical school at Johns Hopkins was an early model.
President Harper included departments of anatomy, physiology, and neurology in the University when it opened, and soon added pathology, bacteriology, physiological chemistry and pharmacology. Plans for a medical school were under discussion from an early date, and by 1898 a formal affiliation with Rush Medical College was signed. Students spent their first two years at the University, then two more years at Rush to complete their MD degree.
The affiliation with Rush was always seen as temporary, although it lasted into the 1940s. Rush had a high reputation as a medical school in Chicago, but it did not represent the research-oriented methods sought by the University. In 1916 Abraham Flexner of the Rockefeller Foundation, a strong advocate of reform for medical education, reviewed the situation at the University and proposed that the University form its own medical school and hospital. The proposal was expensive but would allow the University to define and control its program from the ground up.
A total of $5.3 million was quickly pledged after plans were announced in 1916, but the war and escalating building costs stalled the opening of the school and hospital until 1927. The new 200-bed Billings Hospital allowed students to complete their full clinical training on the University campus. The Rush facility was to be used for post-graduate training and research, although those plans were never fulfilled.
The University of Chicago plan was based on the ideas of Flexner and others at the Rockefeller Institute, which emphasized the need for physicians to be salaried and independent of patient fees. Other university hospitals charged little or nothing to patients who were used in the educational process, but their doctors had private practices "on the side" to make an adequate living. In order to give its physicians full salaries, the University of Chicago had to charge patients regular fees. Using paying patients as teaching subjects was nearly unprecedented, but proved more successful than many anticipated.
Other Chicago institutions soon affiliated with the University, including Chicago Lying-In Hospital, the Country Home for Convalescent Children, the Home for Destitute Crippled Children, the Home for the Incurables, and La Rabida Children's Hospital and Research Center. Each of these added a special focus to the University's program. Recently the hospital expanded its facilities into other parts of the city through an affiliation agreement with Weiss Memorial Hospital on the North Side, the creation of a senior health center at Windermere House in East Hyde Park, and a downtown clinic.
Conceived as a research facility and without the endowment necessary to provide free services to patients, the University of Chicago hospitals and clinics nonetheless provided care to a substantial portion of the South Side population. As other hospitals on the South Side closed in the 1970s and 1980s, the University accepted larger responsibilities for the health care of those in the surrounding neighborhoods. Balancing this responsibility with the needs of research and teaching has been a constant challenge.
THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY:
A Centennial View of the University of Chicago