Remembering Franklyn Prendergast: His 2021 Mayo Clinic commencement speech

One of the great things about Mayo has been the remarkable friendship and basically ease with which all my colleagues over those many years have borne me up when the chips were down, celebrated with me when successes came, and generally allowed me to be part of their lives through sharing and caring. One of my friends, Scott Kaufman, is principal among this selected cohort.

Now let me tell you a little bit about my own time at Mayo. I arrived at Mayo Clinic on Monday afternoon, July 5th, 1971. I was coming from Oxford University with its gargoyles and its wonderful cement or other stone structures—dreaming spires, it’s called the city of dreaming spires—came over a hill and down into Rochester, Minnesota. I was greeted by a plainly Freudian symbol disguised, I believe ingenuously, as a giant corn cob. I wondered where the “H E two sticks” I was.

The next morning, I registered at graduate school. Margaret Thompson was there. I was asked if I had my stethoscope as part of my greeting, and then told that I was late for rounds that morning, and that I would be on call that Tuesday night because I had been late getting through graduate school. And that was in total my introduction to Mayo Clinic. I don’t know if you call that inauspicious, but it certainly was weird.

It took me no more than two weeks, however, to realize that I was in a uniquely rich medical world, one very much my liking, pregnant with scientific possibilities, beautiful medicine, and true care for the patient.

Mayo has created its own culture over time, demanding fealty to the patient first and foremost. But in that regard, they had to solve innumerable real world problems of inadequate tools or knowledge and understanding in every sphere and discipline of medicine. 

This required a robust clinical practice to support inquiry, and each staff member was open to participate to the extent allowed by their talent and proclivities. 

Over the next several decades from the clinic’s inception, the results were a stunning array of research achievements that every one of you in the audience should read about.

It wasn’t just Kendall and Hench and Mattox and their Nobel Prize or even Luis Alvarez; names well recognized from their Nobel Prizes, but an army of others you’ve probably never heard about like Hugh Butt, Charlie Code, Earl Wood, David Albert, [John] Shepherd, […]—and these are just a few, all of whom contributed remarkable to the pantheon of medical science.

It was especially a golden period of basic physiology and by extension, translational pathophysiology. Mayo had a robust translational science program—which you’ve heard about earlier from Fred Meyer, the executive dean—long before the phrase became popularized as though the discipline was somehow new and unique. This had been Mayo’s world for a very long time.

Mayo Clinic had a robust and productive, albeit somewhat informal graduate research and education program at that time. But one dependent entirely for its formal accreditation on the University of Minnesota.

Decade of the seventies, especially when I arrived here, brought the long overdue administrative changes that yielded independent accreditation and formalization of scientific and educational programs, creation of new departments, hiring of dedicated scientists and educators, realization of the rudiments of a more traditional graduate school and also the establishment of the Mayo Medical School.

We are all—all of you in the audience, all of you graduates—now the beneficiaries of the luminaries who conceived and drove the processes, sometimes against formidable odds.