Plant Construction

GREETING the students upon their return was a giant-sized Hopkins Center excavation, where Bissell Hall and other buildings once stood, and other signs of progress on the greatest program of plant expansion Dartmouth has undertaken in thirty years. The success of the Capital Gifts Campaign, which has made this building program possible, is reported in this issue.

At the northern end of the campus, near the Mary Hitchcock Hospital, construction was going forward on a new medical sciences building, made possible by the Dartmouth Medical School's own fund-raising campaign. Ground was broken in July for the $3,500,000 seven-story structure, located off North College Street near Lyme Road. The contract has been given to the Wexler Construction Company of Newton Highlands, Mass., and work is expected to be completed by July 1961.

Funds for the new unit have been raised in a campaign separate from the Capital Gifts Campaign. The Medical School launched this fund-raising effort in 1957, with a goal of $10,000,000. To date approximately $5,100,000 has been pledged or received. Major gifts have been made by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. Public Health Service, the Fannie E. Rippel Foundation, and the James Foundation.

In the new building, each of the six departments of the Medical School - anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, pathology, and microbiology will occupy one floor. An animal house and animal operating room will occupy the top floor. Over 60 per cent of the total space is designed for research purposes, with laboratories for clinical inestigators as well as those doing basic research. Teaching space includes lecture and conference rooms and student laboratories. The building will also house the administrative offices of the School.

An expanded Medical School, with a doubled enrollment of 100, and a greatly enlarged program of basic research in the medical sciences was approved by the Dartmouth Trustees following a study by an outside committee of prominent medical leaders. The committee felt that Dartmouth's two-year program of medical study, in liaison with the four-year medical schools, provided an important answer to the need for more doctors and could serve as a pilot program for other colleges to follow. A larger enrollment for the School and an expanded research and teaching program were also recommended.