A humble, unassuming pair of Mormon physicians, Dr. Homer R. Warner, 86, and Dr. James O. Mason, 78, recently reminisced over the early days of their respective medical careers. Both doctors, nationally recognized and acclaimed, found themselves on the cutting edge of medical research in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Warner expanded his Ph.D. research in heart studies with the development of an analog computer circuit and eventually pioneered medical informatics — the diagnosis and recording of patient symptoms utilizing a main frame computer. In a science that seems routine to current physicians, Warner blazed an important path for patient care as well as medical research. “You do a series of little things that seem not that important or even connected, and then something jumps out at you,” Warner said as he explained his initial body of research. “You learn to take the opportunity and look at things in a whole new way.”
Mason, who encountered many of Warner’s new techniques in the 1960s during training in Boston, returned to Utah to collaborate with Warner on the staff at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City. Subsequently named executive director of the Utah State Health Department, Mason facilitated an agreement between that hospital, the University of Utah, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the state health department to establish the Utah Population Data Base (UPDB). The UPDB consists of Church family history records, vital statistics from the state health department and other state government agencies, and medical records from the University of Utah and Intermountain Health Care hospital systems.
“It was a visionary move by the Church to share those genealogical records with the medical community,” Mason explained. “They had been submitted for an entirely different purpose and it was a leap of faith on the part of (senior Church leaders) to release the records for research, to protect the Church’s privacy and yet advance the causes of medical science.”
Medical genetics research, sometimes facilitated by Warner’s efforts, was also greatly enhanced by the individual efforts of two other groundbreaking Latter-day Saint physicians, Dr. Charles Smart and Dr. Roger Williams, both now deceased. Dr. Smart, in 1966, established the Utah Cancer Registry, a reported record of every diagnosed case of cancer in the state. Williams defined similar data bases for individuals with heart diseases.
Based on these timely collections of medical information and the genealogical records, other University of Utah and medical personnel were able to indentify genetic links to cancers, heart diseases and other inherited illnesses.
“The application of these contributions is huge; this genetics research couldn’t occur without access to these family histories,” Mason noted. “I’ve heard President (Gordon B.) Hinckley say that ‘the Lord has more than one purpose in mind for family history.’”