The First Twenty Years

by John Fopeano

HRP was officially named in 1965. Each department within the school probably would answer differently about what HRP's greatest achievements were during its first twenty years.

For an outsider looking at the med tech department - because that's what I know most about - we were important because we were the first university program to be approved by the Board of Schools of the American Society for Clinical Pathologists. Before that, it had always been hospitals that were approved. There was a considerable amount of politicking to get that done, which Sarah Ciccarelli - Chickie - did a lot of. I'm proud that she became the national president of the American Society of Medical Technology. Another faculty member, Karen Karni, later became national president of ASMT as well.

I'm also proud of the international flavor that our department had during its first twenty years. A lot of these people were graduate students. We had a Kellogg Fellow from Australia. We had scholars from Ecuador and Colombia on LASPAU, a Latin American program administered out of Harvard. We had Ahmed East scholars from the West Bank, and a student from Holland. We had an assistant professor from Nigeria, Igbo Egwu. The first male student in the department was Shafic Twal. He had a Rotary scholarship from Jordan and went on to become a pediatrician.

One of the things we worked on, which other people didn't have then, was electronics. There has been a tremendous revolution in laboratory practice, and it's the result of automation, of electronics and computers. When I started, everything was done by pipetting. It was tedious. I hired Bill Hoefert, from the industrial engineering department at Buff State, to come over in the summer, and I advertised a course to practicing medical technologists. He had taught an adult education course that I took, so I knew he could teach people who didn't know anything about electronics. As far as I knew, that was the first time that anybody, anywhere, had set up an electronics course for medical technologists.