The Rockefeller University Hospital Centennial

100 Years of Bridging Science and Medicine

The Rockefeller University, founded in 1901 as The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was chartered to develop a scientific understanding of "the nature and causes of disease and the methods of its treatment, and to make knowledge relating to these various subjects available for the protection of the health of the public and the improved treatment of disease and injury." To achieve this mission, the trustees recognized the importance of building a research hospital, the first of its kind in the U.S., to complement the basic science laboratories.

On October 26, 1910, the new Rockefeller Institute Hospital admitted its first research participant, opening up a new era of biomedical investigation in which physicians were given the resources and encouragement to engage in fundamental studies in the hospital laboratories on the disease problems they dealt with on the wards of the hospital. Over the Hospital's history, interactions between clinical and basic scientists have taken many productive forms that have greatly advanced the life sciences. A selection of these landmark scientific and medical contributions are described in the Discoveries Advancing Medicine section of our centennial website.