Fraser Mustard began his education at the University of Toronto in engineering but, after one year, switched to medicine, graduating in 1953.

Mustard’s ultimate career direction was not obvious when he began his internship. Clinical medicine seemed appropriate, but he was also drawn to haematology. He then studied for two years at Cambridge University in the laboratory of Lionel Whitby, the Regius Professor of Medicine. Cambridge redirected Mustard’s career plans: instead of becoming a clinician, he chose a career in scientific research. His special area was the investigation of one particular function of blood platelets, a field in which he ultimately scored major advances in medical knowledge. Moreover, in organizing his studies at Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Ph.D. in biology in 1956, he exercised his considerable talents as a planner and as a project manager, skills that would be used regularly in subsequent years.
 

For his life-long dedication to helping others through development of ideas, innovation, and scientific research, the Royal Bank of Canada in 1993 recognized Dr. Fraser Mustard, the founding President of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, with the Royal Bank Award of $125,000 and a Gold Medal. [Photo, courtesy Dr. Charles Roland]

Mustard’s career has taken three directions. On his return to Canada in 1956, there was, first, a decade of research at the University of Toronto, at Sunnybrook Hospital, and at the Ontario Veterinary College at Guelph where he worked primarily with pigs and haemophiliac dogs. During these years, Mustard surrounded himself with others with similar interests. They became his network. Mustard also excelled in scrounging for equipment and funds — excellent training for a future dean and the head of a research institute.

Platelets, minus constituents of blood, and their activity in the body in various conditions became the focus of his research. Eventually, he and his colleagues found that platelets, contrary to wisdom of the time, played a key role in initiating atherosclerotic lesions in blood vessels that were often the precursors of heart attacks or strokes. The fundamental observation was that the first event in the formation of a thrombus in a blood-vessel wall is adherence of platelets to the vessel’s wall. One critical conclusion from this research was that aspirin and other drugs inhibit the potentially dangerous agglomeration of platelets. This discovery has had major implications in the prevention of heart disease, with most physicians recommending daily doses. The benefits apparently are real, though perhaps not as profound as some advertisers have claimed.

Mustard and his co-workers also found that aggregates of platelets in the small blood vessels to the heart could cause disorders of the heart rhythm, infarction, and sudden death. It is now generally accepted that emboli from aggregates in the blood vessel walls play a crucial role in some sudden fatal heart attacks. Such observations have significantly advanced medical knowledge. So important has the work been that Mustard received the unusual distinction of being awarded the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada even though he had never written the customarily compulsory examinations.

Next, in 1966 Mustard moved to Hamilton with his family and, for the next 15 years, he continued his research at McMaster University. Some of the ongoing research was continued by associates in Toronto and Guelph, but some was transported to Hamilton. He was one of the seminal founders of the new McMaster Medical School and chairman of its department of pathology. This innovative medical school was heavily entrenched in the idea that small-group learning and decision making are of vast importance. Moreover, he played a significant role in supporting the unusual architectural style of the new school. Following his long-time friend and football team-mate, John Evans, Mustard became the second dean of the faculty and, ultimately, vice-president for Health Sciences. In these roles, Mustard’s talents for leadership were exercised to their fullest. That the school continues to be seen as a model, having been copied by numerous other institutions around the world, including Harvard, is a tribute to the careful planning and building by many individuals, including Mustard and Evans. Although his laboratory time inevitably declined as his administrative work increased, his expenditure of energy remained prodigious. Few colleagues have been able to match his stamina and the long hours he has devoted to his work.

Early in the 1980s, that energy was directed towards a challenging new endeavour — founding and establishing, in Toronto, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

He became its first president. The Institute, devoted to wide-ranging research, stresses the need for crossover disciplines, interchange of ideas, and stimulating cooperation. Termed an “institute without walls,” the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research has promoted investigations in a variety of scientific areas as wide-ranging as robotics, economic growth and policy, cosmology, population health, superconductivity and evolutionary biology. Research is carried out at universities across the country, with collegial ties drawing in the intellectual input of men and women from around the world.

One of Mustard’s convictions is that resource-based economies will fall behind in the next millennium and that Canada, in order to sustain its present quality of life, must move to an economy based on innovation. The Institute has been designed to encourage and support just this sort of shift in direction.

When Fraser Mustard was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1994, he was given the highest award his native land could give him.

Charles Roland