DR. ELIZABETH BARRETT-CONNOR, a leading epidemiologist, recalled those early days when the fledgling UCSD School of Medicine brought together a virtual Who's Who in medicine and research - names like William Nyhan in genetics and pediatrics, Daniel Steinberg in metabolism and endocrinology, Louis Gluck in neonatology, Marshall Orloff in surgery, J. Edwin Seegmiller in biochemical genetics, and Averill Liebow and Kurt Benirschke in pathology.

The frontier was no longer on the horizon; it was here, taking shape on a few acres of scrub brush and chaparral that once served as a Marine Corps training base, a little more than a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean. "The geography was impressive, the faculty and students were bright. People were coming together to create a good medical school, and within ten years we had a great one," said Barrett-Connor.

Steinberg was lured out in 1968. Before he arrived, he took out a map and traced the California coastline with his finger, noting that San Diego was barely in the United States. "I wasn't even sure that it wasn't on the other side of the border," he recalled.

It would only be a matter of time, however, that the School of Medicine would put San Diego on the map as a leader in medical research and set the standard for medical schools of the future.

Two things immediately made UCSD unique. The first was its policy of recruitment, envisioned by the late Roger Revelle, the noted oceanographer who in the early 1950s spearheaded a drive for a new University of California campus in San Diego. Revelle's idea was to build a university from the top down by attracting stellar names who, in turn, would attract the best students.

By the time the university began taking shape in the early 1960s, Revelle already had recruited Nobelist Harold Urey, physicists Keith Brueckner and James Arnold, and world-renowned geneticist David Bonner, who founded UCSD's Department of Biology. Before the medical school had gone beyond the planning stage, the university had become a magnet for top names in science.

What made UCSD even more unique was Bonner's idea of organizing the medical school as an integral part of the general campus and merging the science faculties with those of the medical school, to insure a free flow of information between science scholars and physicians. Now, for the first time anywhere, biologists, mathematicians, and biochemists would have a say about what medical students were taught in the first two years.

It was a radical concept, one which aroused criticism and controversy. But it didn't take long to see how well it could work. On more than one occasion, such cross-fertilization led to a scientific breakthrough. One such incident involved Dr. Nicholas Halasz, one of the medical school's early faculty. While serving on a committee for academic personnel, a casual conversation with a geophysicist from Scripps Institution of Oceanography helped him explain how a natural chemical that enables an antibody to work could be activated.

"He raised the question from the standpoint of a geophysicist, suggesting how antibodies could be binding to cells in a way nobody thought of," said Halasz. "And he was right." By blocking the chemical, Halasz later demonstrated how to overcome the rejection process in organ transplants.

This combination of scientists and clinicians became a strong marketing tool. "Molecular biology types wanted to be associated with clinical people and clinical people wanted to be associated with molecular biology types. It's why the school gained in stature," said Dr. Robert Livingston, who was well known for his brain-mapping work when he left the National Institutes of Health to chair UCSD's Department of Neurosciences.

That's exactly what Revelle had anticipated when envisioning a great university emerging amid the eucalyptus in the hills above his Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which he served as director for years. Revelle saw not only a university, but a leading research center as well as a pioneering medical school.

The Basic Sciences Building went up in 1968 and a biomedical library soon afterward. And, for awhile, that was pretty much it. Yet, in 1971, the sophomore class competed with more than eighty other medical schools in the country, including Harvard and Cornell Universities, to finish first in preclinical National Board Examinations. The trend continued for the next two years, and within five years UCSD was recognized as one of the top ten medical schools in the country.

Early on, the medical school was seen as a practical arm of vigorous research. Becoming a doctor, however, is also a multi-layered experience requiring technical, diagnostic, and social skills. To satisfy the clinical requirement, the school took over the old county hospital in the Hillcrest section of San Diego that, in 1972, became University Hospital and eventually UCSD Medical Center. Today, the center remains the largest provider of indigent care in San Diego County. The four-story Outpatient Center, the Clinical Teaching Facility, and the main hospital are not only there for the training of primary care physicians, they are also associated with a variety of frontline health centers from Yuba City, near Sacramento, to Mexico's Baja peninsula.

In 1972, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center opened, providing the medical school with a diagnostic arm less than 200 yards away from the La Jolla campus. Soon, the VA was supplementing the UCSD patient base at the medical center, thus greatly strengthening the school's clinical emphasis.

Further affiliations cemented that emphasis. They include the Regional Burn Center, established in 1974; the Regional Trauma Center, which opened in the late 1980s; and the Shiley Eye Center, Thornton Hospital, and William M. Perlman Ambulatory Care Center, which opened in the early 1990s.

Outside of UCSD, the school has also enjoyed a strong association with two premiere research institutions: the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, where immunology and allergy research takes place; and the Salk Institute, leaders in the research of genetic and communicable diseases.

The same quest for excellence that has marked the growth of this institution for the last twenty-seven years continues today, even with the rapid changes in medicine and expanding technology.

The approach at UCSD, unlike most other schools, is to make students more responsible for their education. Students are required to come up with their own questions on a number of topics and to research the answers. Another innovation by the School of Medicine is to use trained actors to mimic symptoms of specific diseases to reflect real problems and issues in the doctor-patient interaction.

Experimentation and a sense of adventure - the same spirit that lured Dr. Livingston here from NIH - are still very much a part of the UCSD scene, just as they were three decades ago. Recalling those early days, Livingston said, "It was a celebratory kind of experience in day-to-day kinds of activity and in terms of a general conception of things. And I never looked back with any hesitation or regret being here."

And neither will you.