On Jan. 27, 1864, William Worrall Mayo opened a medical practice in Rochester, Minnesota. He had been directed to Rochester some 9 months earlier as the result of a short-lived appointment from President Abraham Lincoln to serve as an examining surgeon for the Union Army during the Civil War.

From these beginnings, his independent private practice thrived and later experienced exponential growth when his sons, Dr. William James Mayo (“Dr. Will”) and Dr. Charles Horace Mayo (“Dr. Charlie”) joined after graduating from medical school in 1883 and 1888, respectively, to form a group practice now known as the Mayo Clinic.

Major initiatives include individualized medicine, regenerative medicine, and the science of health care delivery. A major area of research is individualized medicine with direct patient care impact from pharmacogenomics, gene therapy, proteinomics, metabolomics, regenerative medicine and biomarker applications to predict and enhance therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. As the country’s largest tissue and organ transplantation program, Mayo Clinic is also working in cell, tissue, and organ engineering.