CAMDEN After nearly four decades of efforts, South Jersey politicians and community leaders celebrated the grand opening of a new medical school in Camden today.

"This is part of a beginning," a beaming George Norcross, chairman of the Cooper University Hospital board, told a standing-room-only crowd today.

Norcross was instrumental in convincing then-Gov. Jon Corzine to authorize a medical school in Camden, but he wasnt the first in his family to have a role. His father, who was director of the local AFL-CIO, began banging the drum for the Camden school about four decades ago.

Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, along with the recent realignment of higher education in the state, will bring more than $1 billion of much needed development to Camden over the next decade, boost public safety, enhance education and transform the neglected city, Norcross said.

The new medical school will eventually enroll 400 students. But the first class, which begins next month, is limited to 50 students who were chosen from among 2,900 applicants willing to take a chance on a new school.

Gov. Chris Christie said politicians often overemphasize the importance of events, but that the opening of the medical school was not one of those occasions. He called it a "big deal" and said jokingly that his praise has "the added bonus of being true."

More than 300 people crammed into a 250-seat auditorium in the state-of-the-art facility for the opening, which marked the states first new medical school in more than 35 years.

The 200,000 square-foot-building took 17 months to complete at a cost of $139 million.

Many of the speakers at the hour-long dedication also praised the Legislatures recent approval of a higher education restructuring plan that dismantled the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, sending its School of Osteopathic Medicine to Rowan and giving the rest to Rutgers University.

"We will teach the rest of the world" how to embrace and impose change in higher education, Ali Houshmand, the president of Rowan, said in an impassioned speech that echoed the excitement of the day.

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South Jersey celebrates grand opening of Cooper Medical School