e work, teach, and practice in turbulent times. Just a few years ago, health care was still a cottage industry, characterized by the prominence of physician solo practitioners, community hospitals, a few local and regional health maintenance organizations, and 125 academic health centers. Today, the health care system is a fast-consolidating, full-fledged service industry. The solo practitioner has been virtually eliminated. Thousands of local hospitals and hundreds of small regional health organizations have been merged into large regional or national health care organizations. Academic centers, once the undisputed thought and technology leaders, are now scrambling to cope with a highly capitalized private sector that is at once both an aggressive and innovative competitor and, in important ways, a vital collaborator in each of our mission areas. In this transition, the health care environment feels to many like it has gone from calm, open terrain with a clear horizon to a blinding and disorienting sandstorm. You know you must move boldly and quickly in this environment, but it can be very difficult to tell which way is forward, let alone whether one is simply moving in wasteful or aimless circles.

This second issue of Momentum presents compelling evidence that the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) is moving forward through this challenging environment on the basis of superior vision, strong planning, and sustained hard work throughout our organization and institutions.

We are dedicated to ensuring that the WHSC will be one of the world's most exciting and productive centers of new knowledge and innovation in the health sciences in the 21st century. To this end, much of this issue of Momentum concerns our center-wide focus on preserving and bolstering our foundations in discovery research:

From the Director  /  Letters

Yerkes: Link to the Past,
   Hope for the Future

Build It and They Will Come

Putting the PhD in Nursing

Moving Forward  /  Noteworthy

Facing Death and Dying

• The story and strategic trajectory of our Yerkes Primate Center shows pathbreaking leadership and breathtaking (and sometimes heartbreaking) dedication to creating new knowledge and improving health.
   
• The School of Nursing is pioneering in exciting new directions through the introduction of an innovative doctoral program aimed at training a new type of discovery-based nursing leadership for a new era of health care.
   
• Even seemingly mundane issues - like the availability, design, and use of state-of-the-art research facilities - present great opportunities to concretize (literally!) our visions for the future of discovery research.

These initiatives and so many more continue to provide momentum for the leadership agenda of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. They are important for all of us to understand and to share with one another so that we may all become better agents for progress in this turbulent time.

As always, should you find Momentum anything less than a useful and compelling resource, I hope you will let me and our editors know.