Today the medical professionals and scientists are housed mostly in different buildings. There is still a single cafeteria, but that is expected to change as the campus expands. Nienhuis said he hopes a new conference center, part of the planned expansion, will draw people together. Medicine and science benefit from the interaction. Such collaboration sparks innovation, he said.
Ideas develop when people with different perspectives talk about the same problem.
That is how progress occurs. Pinkel, the hospital's first director, said informal collaboration played a pivotal role in the 1960s when St. Jude physicians and scientists were crafting a landmark leukemia study. Pinkel recalled sharing a cafeteria table with a couple scientists from the hospital's molecular biology department. Many colleagues nationwide were skeptical of the hospital's approach, which combined multiple anti-cancer drugs and radiation. In 1971, St. Jude published evidence the approach boosted survival from 4 percent to roughly 50 percent.