Frederick Taylor Gates

Today's Rockefeller University is founded in June 1901 as The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research—often called simply The Rockefeller Institute—in New York City by John D. Rockefeller, who had founded the University of Chicago in 1889, upon advice by his adviser Frederick T. Gates and action taken in March 1901 by his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Greatly elevating the prestige of American science and medicine, it is America's first biomedical institute, like France's Pasteur Institute (1888) and Germany's Robert Koch Institute (1891).