The idea of establishing a medical school at the current site dates back as far as 1891, when John Franklin Crowell, the president of Trinity College as it was known at the time, first announced a public plan to establish a school of medicine. In 1924,
James B. Duke established the
Duke Endowment and directed $40 million to Trinity College to become Duke University. The following year, he made an additional request to establish the Duke School of Medicine, Duke School of Nursing, and Duke Hospital, with the goal of improving health care in the Carolinas and nationwide. Three thousand applicants applied to the new medical school in 1929 and 70 first- and third-year students were selected, including four women, for the School's inaugural class. Just four years after its establishment, Duke was ranked among the top 20 medical schools in the country by the
AAMC. • 1968—
Robert Lefkowitz describes the
adrenaline receptor. • 1972—Child safety cap requirements championed by Jay Arena enacted as federal law. • 1982—Pediatric immunologist
Rebecca Buckley uses bone marrow transplantation to restore the immune systems of children born with
severe combined immunodeficiency, also known as bubble boy disease. • 1984—Bart Haynes contributes to the identification of HTLV-III, now known as
HIV. • 1990—
Joanne Kurtzberg establishes the Duke Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program. • 1994—Louise Markert demonstrates that babies born with no immune system, a fatal condition known as complete
DiGeorge syndrome, can be cured with thymus transplantation. • 1995—Duke scientists link the
BRCA1 and
BRCA2 genes to breast and ovarian cancers. • 2001—
Miguel Nicolelis develops a system that allows monkeys to control robot arms via brain signals, an important step to enable paralyzed people to control
neuroprosthetic limbs. • 2006—YT Chen and Priya Kishnani develop
Myozyme as the first treatment for
Pompe’s disease. • 2011—Hai Yan leads a team of scientists from Duke and
Johns Hopkins universities to identify mutations in a gene that makes cells immortal and appear to play a pivotal role in three of the most common types of brain tumors, as well as cancers of the liver, tongue and urinary tract. • 2013—Duke researcher Jeffery Lawson and
Laura Niklason of
Yale School of Medicine, develop a bioengineered blood vessel, which Lawson grafted into an artery in a Duke patient’s arm, the first in-human procedure of its kind in the United States. • 2015—Clinical trials using
PVS-RIPO, a modified polio virus, to activate the host immune system to fight glioblastomas was featured on 60 Minutes. Preliminary findings have reported limited efficacy. • 2019—Forty-five faculty members were named as some of the most highly cited researchers on a global list from
Clarivate Analytics and
Web of Science, placing Duke SOM in a three-way tie as the 8th ranked institution in the nation. These faculty include
Robert Leifkowitz,
Robert Califf,
Jason Locasale, and Darell Bigner. ==Rankings and admissions==