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Medical School unveils high-tech
home of Weatherhead PET Center
and Smith Cardiovascular
Training Center

By Jacqueline Preston

On June 16, K. Lance Gould, M.D., director of the Weatherhead PET Center for Preventing and Reversing Atherosclerosis at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, along with faculty, staff, and friends, assembled on the ground floor of Hermann Pavilion at Memorial Hermann Hospital for a reception to celebrate the opening of the Weatherhead PET Center for Preventing and Reversing Atherosclerosis and the new Lester Smith Cardiovascular Training Center.

Dr. Gould took guests on a tour of the expanded Weatherhead PET Center. Following the tour, he gave an overview of the center’s 27-year history, citing medical advances that led up to the current non-invasive treatment program. He recalled the devastation of Tropical Storm Allison, which nearly destroyed the center in June 2001. The center’s cyclotron was ruined, but the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, medical records, and database were saved.

“We had just purchased and tested a second-generation PET scanner. And then it rained. The cyclotron building was completely flooded. Every single room was destroyed, even the roof,” Dr. Gould said. “Then the waters went down, and we started over. We’ve literally come out from under the water and are looking up to the sky.”

The Weatherhead PET Center relocated from Jones Pavilion to its current 6,000-square-foot facility earlier this year. The center is home to the latest PET scanner, a combination PET/CT scanner and better analytical software. The Lester Smith Cardiovascular Training Center will serve as a training ground for physicians to learn about PET imaging and preventing and reversing atherosclerosis.

In 2002, Dr. Gould and the Weatherhead PET Center launched the Healing Hearts campaign to fund new generation PET and CT scanners with specialized software and a clinical research program. The campaign was fueled with a $4 million gift from The Weatherhead Foundation and a $1 million gift from the Lester and Sue Smith Foundation. With additional support from the philanthropic community, the campaign exceeded its $11 million goal in 2003.

“We are deeply grateful to Al Weatherhead and Lester Smith,” Dr. Gould said. “I will dedicate the next decade of my life to refining the technology and treatment for preventing and reversing coronary heart disease.”

PET namesake Al Weatherhead III, president of Cleveland-based Weatherhead Industries, and his wife, Celia, helped establish the Weatherhead PET Center in 1999. Their generous gift helped create a distinguished chair in heart disease and expand the imaging and treatment capabilities of the PET Center.

After suffering a heart attack in 1989, Weatherhead was determined not to have another one. As a patient of Dr. Gould’s for the past 14 years, he continues to support Dr. Gould’s innovative approach to managing heart disease. He expressed his thanks to Dr. Gould for the life-saving treatment program.

“To be able to treat heart disease non-invasively is a great gift,” Weatherhead said. “I am proud to be a part of what you are doing as we walk together into the future. The rest of the world will follow behind us.”

Dr. Gould expressed his appreciation of the Medical School’s partnership with Memorial Hermann Hospital to Steve Allen, M.D., CEO of Memorial Hermann Children’s Hospital. He also thanked architects Richard Palumbo and Steve Curry of Curry Boudreaux Architects, designers of the facility, for making the center attractive and functional.

In his closing remarks, Dr. Gould expressed his thanks for his nine-member staff and their teamwork. The center’s staff worked out of Dr. Gould’s home until Memorial Hermann Hospital reopened in July after the flood. Center staff includes cardiologist Stefano Sdringola, M.D., assistant professor of medicine; registered nurses Mary Jane Hess, Mary Haynie, and Karen Alloway; executive assistant Susan Hood; business director Ro Edens; senior staff assistant Darla Hicks; registered technician Dilip Patel; and database manager Rick Kirkeeide, Ph.D.

“It’s people that make it work,” Dr. Gould said.

Knobil gift creates endowment
for Medical School scholarships

By Jacqueline Preston

When Julie Hotchkiss Knobil, Ph.D., retired research professor and widow of renowned neuroendocrinologist Ernst Knobil, Ph.D., heard that the Medical School sorely needed scholarship money for its students, she went to work. In 2001, as a member of The Organization of Faculty Wives and Women Faculty, Dr. Knobil served as editor of a cookbook produced by the organization titled Something’s Cooking to fund scholarships. But Dr. Knobil wanted to do even more. She personally gave $2,500 to fund the Ernst Knobil Memorial Scholarship, named in honor and memory of her late husband’s work.

This year, Dr. Knobil had another idea. Instead of setting up a scholarship fund each year, she would set up a fund that would provide annual scholarships in perpetuity. She decided to create a $100,000 permanent endowed scholarship that will benefit medical students for years to come.

“The faculty wives and women faculty and I saw the need and talked to the student affairs staff. We found out how badly they needed the money,” Dr. Knobil recalls. “The cookbook drew my attention to the need, but I also thought I should do something privately.”

The newly endowed scholarship, named the Ernst Knobil Endowed Scholarship Fund after the former Medical School dean, will provide scholarship support to needy students enrolled in the Medical School. When the scholarship is fully endowed, a deserving medical student will receive approximately $5,000 each year, or about half a year’s tuition and fees.

UT Health Science Center President James T. Willerson, M.D. says that endowed scholarships are a top priority and critical to keep the doors to a medical education open to deserving students regardless of their financial circumstances. He calls the Knobil gift an investment in human capital.

“We are extremely grateful to Dr. Julie Knobil for investing in one of our most valuable resources – our students,” Dr. Willerson says. “This scholarship gift helps ensure that we attract and retain the most promising students.”

Medical School Dean Stanley G. Schultz, M.D., recalls working as a colleague of Julie and Ernst Knobil when he was chair of physiology at the Medical School. Dr. Schultz also worked alongside Ernst Knobil at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where Knobil served as chair of physiology. He is excited that Julie Knobil has given back so much to the Medical School.

“Both Julie and Ernie Knobil were distinguished educators, and I can think of no better way to commemorate Dr. Knobil’s name than with scholarships that recognize academic excellence,” Dr. Schultz says. “This wonderful gift recognizes his important work, and our students will greatly benefit from Julie’s generosity.”

Julie Knobil retired from UT Health Science Center in 1998 after working as a research professor of physiology and then integrative biology at the Medical School, where she lectured on mammalian physiology and perinatal endocrinology. The Albany, N.Y., native earned a doctorate in physiology from Harvard University in 1962, where she met her future husband. During their 40-year marriage, the Knobils carefully balanced work and family life, having raised four children.

“Ernst was teaching, and I was one of his students,” Dr. Knobil recalls. “He taught a lot of medical students and postdoctoral fellows throughout his career and had planned on retiring in 1999.”

After battling pancreatic cancer, Ernst Knobil died on April 13, 2000, at the age of 73.

Ernst Knobil was Medical School dean from 1981 to 1984. He was considered one of the world’s leading neuroendocrinologists whose work provided the basis for understanding how hormonal imbalances affect a woman’s menstrual cycle. This led to the creation of a successful treatment for infertility caused by low hormone production. The treatment has a 90 percent success rate in achieving pregnancy. Following his tenure as dean, Knobil remained active in the laboratory and classroom until his death.

Dr. Knobil is certain that her late husband would have joined her in supporting student scholarships.

“During the 16 years I taught at the Medical School, I saw a lot of first-year medical students with a real need. The enormous debt these kids were carrying was mind-boggling,” Dr. Knobil says. “They must have had a real vision in order to keep plugging away while carrying that kind of debt.”

Dr. Knobil says her family has been given much and doesn’t mind spreading out her resources to help talented medical students – students, she says, deserve support.

Businessman contributes $25K
to Surgical Skills Center

By Darla Brown

It didn’t take much convincing for one Houston businessman to see the need to establish the Medical School’s Surgical and Clinical Skills Center.

“I just talked to Dr. Schultz and Dr. Brent King and was impressed with their work and the impact this facility will have on the Medical School and the physicians in training,” explains Jeb Bashaw, president and CEO of James E. Bashaw, a Houston investment firm.

Following that conversation, Bashaw, a native Houstonian, gave a $25,000 gift to the Surgical and Clinical Skills Center (SCSC) – a new educational resource for the Medical School, which is scheduled to open in 2006.

“We greatly appreciate generous donors like Jeb, who understand our vision for the future of medical education,” says Dean Stanley Schultz.

The SCSC will be an 11,400 square-foot facility in the Medical School basement, which promises to be an important resource for Medical School students in all years of the curriculum, as well as for residents, fellows, faculty, other practicing physicians, and industry and hospital partners. It will feature both clinical training through patient-actors and simulated learning with mannequins.

The SCSC will be the home of the Medical School’s standardized patient program, complete with 12 patient rooms, video control and monitoring rooms, and upgraded video equipment and software. For the past several years this program has operated in leased space from the Houston Medical Center.

The highly complex simulated learning center will allow students to repeatedly experience real-life scenarios with mannequins that simulate normal breath, blood pressure, and other key vital signs that can respond to treatment. It was these simulators that caught Bashaw’s attention.

“Anyone can give money to have their name on a building, but not everyone can have their name on a dummy,” he laughs, adding that he has not yet decided upon the name of the mannequin that he has donated to the SCSC. “My kids, 16-year-old Mason and 13-year-old Travis, and my wife, Kim, will help me decide.”

Bashaw’s Tanglewood-based business manages more than $500 million for Houston investors and their families. “I’ve been in the business more than 20 years and started the firm four years ago,” he says.

Bashaw, a new member of the UT Health Science Center Development Board, is no stranger to philanthropy, having served in numerous volunteer capacities across Houston, including chair of the development board for the Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston.

“I’ve been very impressed with my short affiliation with the school so far – my experiences have been spectacular. This is a great organization, and I’m excited about the impact the Surgical and Clinical Skills Center will have on the training of the students,” Bashaw says..

Grateful patient bequeaths
professorship in neurology
department

By Darla Brown

Two decades ago, a patient suffering from a rapid onset of neurological symptoms was referred to Dr. Jerry Wolinsky, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Research Group and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis Center. Today, thanks to the generosity of that grateful patient, and a strong physician-patient relationship, Dr. Wolinsky has been named the holder of the Opal Rankin Professorship in Neurology.

“J. Taylor Wharton, M.D., now professor, gynecologic oncology at M. D. Anderson, called and told me about Mrs. Rankin. Her initial symptoms had suggested that she probably had a brain tumor, but it turned out to be a demyelinating disease that proved to be multiple sclerosis,” Dr. Wolinsky recalls. “That began my two decades of taking care of her for multiple sclerosis.”

Rankin had just moved to Horseshoe Bay in 1984, when a year later she was stricken with multiple sclerosis. She soon relocated to Houston to be near her medical treatment team, which was headed up by Dr. Wolinsky, and remained there until her death on June 19, 2004.

“She had been significantly disabled from the original attack, so over the years we battled with her disease, and I made house calls from time to time. We established a personal relationship as well as a professional relationship, and I got to know her friends and those around her,” Dr. Wolinsky says. “It was a privilege to take care of her over most of my time spent in Texas. Others here at the university were also involved in her care, particularly toward the end.”

In addition to the endowed professorship created through her will, Rankin made annual gifts to Dr. Wolinsky’s research fund while a patient.

“She was a very generous lady. When I found out about the professorship, I was surprised and touched,” he adds.

Shirley Raines, friend and guardian to Rankin, said that even in the face of her illness, she was a delight who kept everyone laughing with her dry sense of humor.

“She truly was a generous person,” Raines says. “She created the professorship in an effort to say thank you to Dr. Wolinsky for the care he had given her all of those years.”

That generosity has contributed to a growing multiple sclerosis research enterprise under Dr. Wolinsky’s direction.

“Over the years the research has transitioned, but always one way or another, it has been heavily involved in investigating new drugs and therapeutic approaches for the treatment of multiple sclerosis,” Dr. Wolinsky explains. “We have been involved in almost all the major clinical trials of this disease and have had an ongoing and productive interaction with Dr. Ponnada Narayana because of his interest in MRI.”

Dr. Narayana, director of Magnetic Resonance Research and professor of diagnostic and interventional imaging, and Dr. Wolinsky have collaborated on a successful imaging program that monitors the progression of multiple sclerosis patients.

“This research has been helped by the generosity of Mrs. Rankin over the years and now into the future with the professorship. Others, including the Bartels family, Clay Walker and his Band Against MS, the Clayton Foundation, the NIH and our colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry also have funded what has turned into one of the dominant research groups in the country, internationally known for its work with imaging and clinical trials,” says Dr. Wolinsky, who also holds the Bartels Family Professorship in Neurology.

“Folks like Opal Rankin have brought into the open this difficult problem that needs to be solved and managed, and they have the vision to see beyond their own fight with multiple sclerosis to help make it better for others in the long run,” he says.