Cancer:
It's a huge research area and anywhere you go will have good people working on cancer. The more important thing is to look at the PIs themselves and see which approach you like the best. There are so many angles by which to study cancer.
UT Southwestern has Xiaodong Wang, who is a leader in understanding apoptosis, which is critical to understanding why cells becomes cancerous instead of self-destructing.
I have not talked to any faculty at UW specifically about their cancer research, but with Hutchinson, I'm sure there are many people there working on something that interests you.
Immunology:
Again pretty broad field. Figure out your angle on it. UT Southwestern has several people (Rosen, Wuelfing, Wu, Alchuster) who are collaborating on a project to examine how the actin cytoskeleton may play a role in T-cell activation.
Structual Biology:
Rama Ranganathan at UTSW has some of the best ideas about protein structure I've seen. Some other people around the country are using similar approaches, but his explanations seem very clear from first principles to the actual engineering of a protein.
UW has some people working on interesting self-assembly questions such as Sarah Keller.
Bioinformatics:
UTSW is at some disability here because of the lack of a whole university; however UT Dallas is an excellent Computer Science school, whereas SMU has excellent staticians. The recent hire of Steve Alchuster and Lani Wu as heads of the Green Institute is making things interesting. UT Austin also has excellent supercomputing facilities. There are several people working on Bioinformatics projects (Rama, "Skip" Garner, Scheuremann). You actually might want to look Schueremann up since he's working on multi-dimensional analysis of flow cytometry data, which could be applied to many cancer / immunology questions.
Outdoors:
Washington State would be amazing place to hike about. The Northwest coast is also awe inspiring.
I have to agree there is not much to see around Dallas that you probably have not already seen.
Medical School:
UTSW has a fairly large medical school, but I think its advantage comes in with the hospitals nearby. Learning and practicing medicine in a place like Parkland is hard to beat; I'm not sure where else you would get that much hands on experience. At a large charity hospital, you will see cases that would be rare to witness anywhere else. The recent aquisition of St. Paul and Zale-Lipsy is also a plus and addresses the need for specialty procedures.
Especially for MD/PhDs, the med school classes themselves are not a particularly distinguishing factor; they cover the biology of the human biology with great breadth but lack the depth that you will end up with in the graduate classes. Mike Brown feels very strongly about the traditional curriculum so that is unlikely to change in the next few years at UTSW.
Conclusions
I am a little bit biased towards UTSW, hence my selection. Either school is amazing, but to make your decision I encourage you to try to become more specific. What are your research interests? Is there anyone that you talked to that is approaching that interest using techniques that agree with how you think about the problem?
Given the strength of the medical experience and of the basic research, I think it is difficult to find a school that is as well rounded as UTSW. I have seen better disease oriented research at other places, but perhaps it was just because I was not looking for it in Dallas.
Anyways, good luck with your decision. Probably the best thing to do is to visit UW, sleep on it, wait a week, and then go with your gut instinct. There is just way too much information to rationalize in your concious mind. Go with what feels right.
