Laudatio to Professor Fletcher B. Taylor

For more than a half-century, cardiovascular scientist Fletcher B. Taylor, Jr., M.D., (portrayed above) has made important contributions to preclinical, translational and clinical research in vascular biology, coagulation and pathophysiology of sepsis. His work in the laboratory led to the creation of a lifesaving drug – the first and the only FDA-approved treatment for severe sepsis. So, the advent of Taylor’s 80th birthday seems the ideal moment to dedicate this series of reviews on sepsis to a devoted scientist, a compassionate physician and a true Renaissance man. Fletcher Taylor was born in San Francisco, California, in 1929. His father, an internal medicine specialist, was widely respected as a diagnostician in the East Bay area and counted among his patients the Nobel-prize winning playwright Eugene O’Neill. Although raised in an upper-class, urban atmosphere, young Taylor was drawn to the simple life. During high school, he worked as a ranch hand and cowboy, or ‘buckaroo’, as he said they were called in western Nevada. ‘I would go to high school for about six months and then spend the rest of the time up in the mountains,’ he recalls. As a young adult, Taylor had in-depth classical music training with Dr. Alexander Rabb and Serghei Rachmaninov, aiming to become a concert pianist. These were challenging ‘coming to age’ times and he found quite hard mastering the piano as a profession. At that point, he found escape in outdoor work and spent 6 months on a farm in post-war Slovenia. Despite not pursuing it as a career, music remained very important in his life and he still plays piano with dazzling technique and intensity. This wonderful blend of familial, cultural and educational backgrounds influenced his development of key intellectual qualities for a successful career: dedication to hard work, open-mindedness, unlimited curiosity and a very creative imagination. After earning his bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford University in 1952, Taylor entered doctoral studies in medicine at University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, where he obtained his M.D. degree in 1956. During his second year of surgical internship at the Southern Pacific Hospital, his anatomy professor William O. Rinehart invited him to work on a project involving the effects of adrenalectomy on eosinophils. When a window was mistakenly left open, all the post-surgical mice in the experiment died. From what should have been a setback, Taylor instead was thrilled to observe the importance of the adrenals in protecting animals against stressful conditions, such as cold. The root of Taylor’s creativity may be traced to this failed study, for from it grew his fascination with cause–effect interactions and the ability to predict and reproduce those effects in an experimental setting. This may have contributed to his exceptional ability to read and interpret nature. At his mentor’s encouragement, he travelled to England in 1958, where he focused exclusively on research for 2 years, working with Richard Harrison (anatomy) and C.J.O.R. Morris (biochemistry) at the London Hospital. As he recalls now, ‘I sat and read for 3 months, soaking in the sights, sounds, and smells of a post-war London still choked in smog from thousands of coal fires J. Cell. Mol. Med. Vol 12, No 4, 2008 pp. 1069-1071