Dr. E. Stanfield Rogers was appointed full-time research director of the University of Tennessee Memorial Research Center and Hospital in August 1957. A Tennessee native and graduate of Duke University’s medical school, Rogers came to UT from Duke. He also had spent four years at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The Tennessee legislature made this possible by appropriating $150,000 to begin the research center and an additional $100,000 to operate it in 1958–59. In 1958 Rogers was elected an affiliate member of England’s Royal Society of Medicine. In 1959 he received recognition for his cancer research at the American Society for Experimental Pathology. He left the research center in May 1964 to pursue cancer research at Oak Ridge. In 1960 a subcommittee of the UT Board of Trustees reported that radioactive isotopic investigation had been abandoned in favor of greater concentration on cancer research and a developing space medicine program. By 1968 the research center excelled in birth defects research, blood disorders, and cancer research. In the late 1960s, UT’s research center was chosen as one of 15 sites to test the drug L-Dopa to control the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In the 1980s, the medical department assumed responsibility for clinically based researchers, and the research emphasis shifted from basic biomedical research to clinically applied research. The separate “research center” designation was dropped.