| Rochester’s Mayo Clinic Goes Irish
By Katarina Maria Grande
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is thousands of miles from Co.
Mayo on Ireland's west coast; but it is home to 21 O'Connors, 19 O'Briens,
22 Griffins, 19 O'Neills and a slew of other Irish-Americans.
The healthcare facility was started in the late 1800s with an English
immigrant and his two sons, Will and Charlie Mayo. The Mayo brothers proved
to be gifted doctors like their father and attracted patients from across
the country. Today, the hospital is recognized as one of the best; U.S.
News magazine ranked Mayo directly behind the winner, Johns Hopkins
Hospital in 2006. And the immigrants employed at Mayo Clinic today are
just as brilliant as the healthcare facility's namesake.
Take Michael O'Connor, originally from Dublin, a professor of radiologic
physics in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He's working on developing
an alternative to mammography as a method of breast cancer screening. Mammograms
are rather crude devices; they miss a lot of cancer due to the limits on
resolving power.
"It's nice that you can pick up a large tumor but if the tumor is smaller
than about fifteen millimeters, which is about three-quarters of an inch,
then your chances of seeing it drop off quite dramatically," O'Connor said.
Furthermore, mammograms involve compression of the breast tissue — a
process most women find uncomfortable.
"Mammography is actually quite poor," O'Connor said, citing a recent
major study. "If you have cancer, the chance of the mammogram picking it
up is 40%. That's not very good."
O'Connor and his research team are using a modified version of a machine
called a semiconductor-based gamma camera to screen for tumors. This device
can pick up tumors as small as four millimeters and involves much less
breast compression than mammograms. The device is currently being tested,
and the early results look promising. O'Connor's team was able to detect
small tumors in seven patients with their device, whereas mammograms picked
up only one of them.
This project likely wouldn't have been possible in Ireland. While Ireland
today is economically booming in industries like pharmaceuticals, this
wasn't the case 20 years ago when O'Connor and his wife came to the States.
"At the time, economically, Ireland wasn't doing very well, and, also,
financially we weren't doing very well with what we had…your salary wasn't
enough to make ends meet. So it was kind of getting rough," said O'Connor.
He said he left Ireland primarily to find better research opportunities.
After receiving his doctorate from Trinity University and then working
as a medical physicist at St. James Hospital in Dublin for eight years,
O'Connor applied to the Mayo Clinic.
"We initially thought, well, we'll do it for three years. But Mayo is
kind of like a honey pot. You know, you get into this place, you get stuck.
And the opportunities here are so good; I can do things here I could never
do back in Ireland—at least not back then," said O'Connor.
The day the Mayo job announcement appeared in an advertisement, O'Connor's
wife was expecting her second child. She "wasn't exactly thrilled" at the
prospect of leaving her friends and family as she raised an infant…but
the move worked out.
Today, the O'Connors visit Ireland at least once a year and find that
the number of people they visit is growing. Their children have experienced
their parents' homeland as much as possible, and Mrs. O'Connor still speaks
a bit of Irish.
"There is an Irish community here in Rochester…so it's kind of like
your extended family. Even if you don't particularly like somebody, it's
like 'tough, they're your family.'…We still get together on Paddy's Day
and all have a great time," O'Connor said.
One aspect of Ireland O'Connor doesn't miss: the weather. He hated the
dreary, everyday rain that makes umbrella-toting a way of life. He posits
that the large number of pubs in Ireland is due to the weather—the pubs
are there to cheer up people when it rains. However, O'Connor noted that
the weather is responsible for Ireland's character.
"See, the bad weather is a critical part of Irish heritage because it
gets people to the pubs, it gets them to relax, and it brings a lot of
good music. And without the pubs, there'd be none of those things. Ireland
wouldn't be Ireland. And the pub is only there because of the rain so if
you had good weather, Ireland would fall apart."
 
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