Drs. Geraldine Taplin and John Morrison, who met during medical school and have been together for 48 years, are part of the Class of 1972, the very first School of Medicine graduates.
“Our first year was actually spent in downtown Los Angeles because the UCI campus wasn’t even ready for us,” explains Taplin, who is a retired infectious disease specialist. “So we transferred to the physical UCI campus as second-year medical students. Even then we just had a building with classrooms in it surrounded by a lot of dirt.”
After medical school, Taplin completed an infectious disease fellowship at UCI and Morrison taught in the Pulmonary Division of the UCI Department of Medicine for 3.5 years. The couple then moved to Monterey County, where they both practiced medicine for over four decades.
Last year, Taplin was instrumental in the committee that organized the Class of 1972 50th reunion. Because the reunion took place in the wake of the pandemic, she and Morrison urged their classmates to consider what they might do to encourage good public health messaging and education. The MD Class of 1972 presented the School of Medicine an endowed scholarship in support of future students in the MD/MS in Public Health joint degree program. Taplin and Morrison kickstarted the fundraising and classmates eagerly joined in. The opportunity remains open if additional classmates would like to contribute.
“Unfortunately, the pandemic politicized science and further divided the nation,” says Morrison, who specialized in critical care and pulmonology before retirement. “So we felt strongly that the class gift might help. We want to support people going into the public health subspecialty with a science background – a physician as opposed to a politician – involved in health communications to the public.”
During the reunion festivities, Taplin and Morrison reconnected with the university, toured new facilities and talked with current medical students. They were delighted with the changes they observed.
“What we noticed was the philosophy of the medical school has changed and progressed so much,” says Morrison. “A considerable improvement is that students are getting clinical, hands-on experiences far sooner than we ever did.” And Taplin notes that the old “didactic” way of teaching has thankfully given way to more progressive and productive inquiry-based methods.
Taplin and Morrison have always given a great deal of time and energy to their local community in Monterey – for example, both were on the teaching faculty at the county hospital in Salinas and Taplin launched the first two HIV/AIDS clinics in the area. Taplin also came out of retirement temporarily to assist the local hospital in its COVID response efforts.
But at the reunion they started to more deeply ponder what else their legacy might include.
“While we were there, we had the opportunity to meet with [Program in Public Health] Dean Bernadette Boden-Albala and discuss all the different courses in public health communication. And, again, we were just extremely impressed,” says Taplin.
The couple, who have five UC degrees between them conferred by UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Irvine, always knew they’d ultimately leave a large portion of their estate to University of California. “We are indebted. We couldn’t have had the life we have had without our education from the UC system,” says Morrison.
But now they’ve decided that their final gift, like the ’72 class gift, will be devoted specifically to UCI School of Medicine scholarship endowments that focus on those students interested in addressing the health of communities. They want to help alleviate the enormous financial burden that might prevent some med students from pursuing public health. The gift expresses what they truly want to change in the world.
“We want to fund medical students who will become physicians who devote themselves to communities,” says Taplin. “The health of populations is what medicine should be about – not just caring for individuals who have enough money to get insured.”
