Veritas, Vol. 31, No. 06, November 15, 1990

              Jean McArthur Davis honored at dedication of Engineering Building Addition
A picture-perfect South Florida day set the tone for the dedication of the J. Neville McArthur Engineering Building Addition on October 16. Balmy breezes blew across McLamore Plaza as more than 150 people gathered for the ceremony honoring Board of Trustees member Jean McArthur Davis, whose support made the addition possible.
It was Davis' father, dairy farm owner James Neville McArthur, founding Citizens Board member and active member of the Board of Trustees from 1955 to 1969, whose interest in engineering led to the gift that created the main engineering building in 1959-
“After World War II my father realized Miami would be a large international city,” said Davis to the guests, “and a first-rate university was a must. He worked hard to make UM a credit to the community.
Jean McArthur Davis shows her delight after cutting the ribbon with some high-tech help. With her (left to right) are her daughter, Nancy; her husband, James; engineering student Gemma Gonzalez; engineering dean Martin Becker; President Edward T. Foote II; and Board of Trustees chairman Ray Goode.
“This is one of the finest days of my life,” she continued. “I'm grateful that God gave me this opportunity to make this gift.”
The guests then moved to an entranceway of the addition, where the ribbon was cut, appropriately enough, by a robot. The ribboncutting was followed by the unveiling of an oil painting of the late McArthur.
The 20,000-square-foot addition contains classrooms, a computer teaching laboratory, a lecture hall, faculty offices, and research facilities for the biomedical, mechanical, and electrical and computer engineering departments.
“This is the first building to be completed as made possible by the five-year Campaign for the University of Miami,” said President Edward T. Foote II. “We are beginning to see the fruits of our labors.”
—Susan May
Clinical research center opens with $8 million from NIH
A general clinical research center, one of 78 in the nation funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), officially opened last month at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center (UM/JMMC) with an $8 million NTH grant.
The center’s research is directly related to diseases, and patients themselves participate in the studies as research subjects. (NIH funds all patient bills.) In fact, the first patient in the center underwent an islet transplant to help correct her diabetes.
The establishment of clinical research centers, where research findings are tested on patients, is the result of the explosion in the
basic sciences. With the medical center’s own exponential growth during the past decade, both in the basic and clinical sciences, there is an ideal climate for a general clinical research center here.
“If the progress in basic sciences were not translated into improvement in healthcare,” says Adel A. Yunis, program director of the UM/ JMMC General Clinical Research Center and professor of medicine, “we’d be working in a vacuum.”
The general clinical research center has two objectives—to promote and carry out first-rate, high-quality clinical investigations and to serve as a training center for clinical investigators, involving residents, young faculty members,
and medical students.
Located on hospital grounds, the new general clinical research center represents a partnership between Jackson Memorial Hospital and the University of Miami School of Medicine. Physician scientists in the medical school have joint appointments with the University and the hospital, and with eight beds, a nurses station, metabolic kitchen, sample preparation and storage laboratory, an outpatient area, and administrative offices, the center is essentially like a hospital contained within itself.
All researchers in the medical center have the option of using the facilities for clinical research in the areas of diabetes, cardiology,
endocrinology, hematology, neurology, nephrology, hepatalogy, and neonatology.
The kinds of research undertaken at the center might include a study of the therapeutic efficacy of growth factors or the effect of a controlled diet on blood cholesterol levels.
“As physicians, we exist for the betterment of human health,” says Yunis. “There is hardly anything more satisfying to a physician scientist than to witness the unraveling of the basic mechanisms underlying a clinical puzzle or the translation of a piece of basic data into improvement in healthcare.”
—Ann Reaben Prospero