UCLA Medical Center

UCLA Medical Center is a hospital located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California.

It is rated as one of the top three hospitals in the United States and is the top hospital on the West Coast according to US News & World Report. The hospital has been ranked in the top twenty in 15 of the 16 medical specialties ranked by the U.S. News ranking. Ten of those specialties were ranked in the top ten. UCLA Medical Center has research centers covering nearly all major specialities of medicine as well as dentistry and optometry, and is the primary teaching hospital for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The hospital's emergency department is certified as a level I trauma center for adults and pediatrics.

Reputation in oncology research
UCLA Medical Center is well-known as the defendant in a famous Supreme Court of California case, Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120 (1990). The court decided that patient John Moore had no property rights in the immensely profitable "Mo" cell line which UCLA researchers had discovered when they removed his cancerous spleen.

Nobel Prize in Medicine
UCLA faculty member and pharmacologist Louis Ignarro's discovery of one of the most important signaling molecules in the human body, nitric oxide, led to the Nobel Prize in medicine. This discovery revolutionized the fields of cardiopulmonary medicine and immunology.

Facility
The center itself is a sprawling 11-story brick building designed by Welton Becket. It is considered a landmark of early modern architecture. The center was built in several phases, the first of which was completed in 1953. The hospital has a "tic-tac-toe" layout of intersecting wings, creating a series of courtyards throughout the complex. The first floor is unusual in that most of its walls are completely clad in a thick layer of naturally-weathered travertine, creating an unusual "organic" appearance which many have likened to "being inside of a tree". The exterior architecture is very simple, consisting of a red brick wall with horizontal bands of stainless-steel louvers over the windows to keep direct sunlight from heating the building.

The UCLA "Replacement Hospital"
The existing hospital complex suffered moderate damage in the Northridge earthquake of 1994 which damaged its interior mainframe.. Because several hospitals were severely damaged during the Northridge quake and injured people had to be transported long distances for emergency care, the state of California passed SB1953, an amendment to an older law requiring all hospitals to move their acute care and intensive care units into earthquake-safe buildings by 2008. The university is currently building a new UCLA Westwood Replacement Hospital across the street from the current one to comply with the law.

The new 1,050,000 square foot hospital is named after the late President of the United States and Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was designed by renowned Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei, and has been touted to be the most technologically advanced hospital in the world. The hospital will contain fewer patient beds (525) than the one it replaces. Patient beds in the intesive care units will be accessible to nurses and doctors from 360 degrees, and surgical floor plans will be modular allowing them to be expanded and reconfigured as medical technology evolves. The hospital is to be sheathed with polished marble panels sold at below-market-rate cost by the owner of an Italian quarry whose cancer was cured at UCLA.

Some of the old complex will be torn down and some of it will be renovated and turned into office space when it is no longer an operational hospital. The law does not require that all parts of a hospital be made earthquake-safe, only the most important parts. Much of the extensive travertine wall cladding from the building's interior will most likely be salvaged and re-used.

Due to budget cuts and other circumstances, the project's completion has been delayed, from 2004 to its current planned opening date 2008.