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FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM Walter Muraoka, principal architect at Architects Hawaii, gave a tour yesterday of the nearly completed UH Medical Education Building in Kakaako.

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New med school
takes shape

A convention of scientists and venture capitalists is the chosen audience for the unveiling of the state's $150 million medical school and bioscience research center in Kakaako.

Hawaii residents may have a first peek inside the new John A. Burns School of Medicine at the "gala reception" Jan. 14 if they are willing to pay the $160 ticket price.

Two Nobel Prize winners and 15 other eminent researchers will speak at the Hawaii Bioscience Conference at the Hawai'i Convention Center Jan. 13 and 14, an event timed for the opening of the new facility.

Dr. Ed Cadman, dean of the medical school, said the emphasis on research combined with education will be a "catalyst" to bring high-tech industry to Hawaii. "All the research labs are filled. There will be $60 million of research" in the Biosciences Building, he said.

A few fine details were taking shape yesterday as Cadman and Architects Hawaii's Walter Muraoka and Jeffrey Nakamura led a news media tour of the site.

Muraoka called the medical school plan "high tech, high touch" with aspects that "balance technical needs with accommodations for real people." There is a "serendipitous center" of space where researchers can meet outside the labs in the research wing.

The medical school lobby and a cafeteria with outside seating around a decorative pool will offer space for "human interaction," he said. The cafeteria, operated by Kapiolani Community College's culinary program, will be open to the public.

Only one room had a "mock-up" of laboratory furniture yesterday, but the other space in the laboratory building is in a state of raw construction, 17-foot high ceilings full of pipes and conduits, wiring exposed and building materials stacked. The research building will not be ready for occupancy until August.

The tropical colonial-style buildings will carry a decorative motif of four Hawaiian healing plants -- lehua, awa, popolo and kukui -- plus the double-helix symbol of DNA, seen in a tapa design below the roof line and in etched-glass panels of the medical school building.

Cadman said medical students will start moving down from the Manoa campus for classes in April. New teaching features for them will include a "virtual surgery center," which he compared to flight simulation for pilots, and computerized mannequins to practice on, drawing blood and other procedures "until they get it right," Cadman said.

One thing that is up and running in the medical school is an energy-saving air-conditioning system that relies on cold ocean water, a first in Honolulu.

"This isn't about the renaissance of Kakaako; it's about nurturing a new biotech industry. Five years ago there was talk of closing the medical school. There won't be a biotech industry unless there is a research-intensive medical school," Cadman said.