History
OMRF was chartered in 1946. The next year, Oklahoma Gov. Roy J. Turner launched a fund drive for OMRF that spanned all 77 of Oklahoma’s counties. By May 1949, 7,000 Oklahomans had donated and pledged $2.35 million, and construction of OMRF began.
In the summer of 1949, Sir Alexander Fleming made his first visit to the United States to dedicate OMRF’s yet-to-be-completed building. An estimated 2,500 people attended the ceremonies on July 4 of that year, where Fleming pronounced the future “bright” for what was then, in the Nobel laureate’s words, “just a big hole in the ground.”
OMRF opened its doors on Dec. 17, 1950. Since that time, OMRF has grown from 5 principal scientists to 50, and its staff has grown from roughly two dozen employees to more than 500. Securing more than $30 million annually in competitive research grants from the National Institutes of Health and other granting agencies, OMRF is a member of the Association of Independent Research Institutes. Its scientists focus on research in the areas of immunology, cardiovascular biology and diseases of aging.
Read more about this topic: Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)