2009 Presidential Address: Mentoring … Touching the Future
- From the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.
- Corresponding author: R. Paul Robertson, President, Medicine and Science, American Diabetes Association, rpr{at}pnri.org.
Mentoring may be the most important thing we do on a daily basis. It produces some of our greatest experiments and successes, our mentees themselves. Ironically, although we are fond of publishing data from diabetes research, we never publish the results of our mentoring in contemporary literature. We must turn to oral and written history to even define the word “mentoring.” What exactly is it?
A modestly revised version of Greek mythology.
The word “mentor” evolved from Homer's opus, The Odyssey. Odysseus (or Ulysses, his other name) was a graduate of Cornell University and became King of Ithaca. He was very conflicted about fighting the Trojan War. To avoid going to battle, he pretended to be crazy by plowing his field with salt. However, the Greek military was suspicious and tested Odysseus by putting his newly born son, Telemachus, in front of his plow. Odysseus stopped plowing to save his son. Having thus demonstrated his sanity and blown his cover, Odysseus joined the army and sailed up the wine-dark Aegean Sea to Troy where he entered graduate school in the Greek War College. His research project was to ascertain the effect of wooden horses on warfare. Before leaving Ithaca, Odysseus had asked an elderly friend named Mentor to provide advice to Telemachus, as well as to his lovely wife Penelope.
After fighting the Trojans for 10 years and defeating them, Odysseus received his first patent for inventing the Trojan horse and in many other ways distinguished himself in wisdom and leadership. He received his phd in Creative Combat and then started out on his victorious trip home, sailing south and seeing the sights in the Aegean Sea. However, he encountered storms, took several wrong turns, and wound up traveling around the southern Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian, and Ionian seas for 10 more years. This became his first postdoctoral …
