September 28, 2025, 3:06am MDT
Editor’s Note: After a lifetime of dedicated service, President Russell M. Nelson passed away on September 27, 2025 at the age of 101. This article is part of a series that explores various aspects of President Nelson’s exemplary, faithful life.
President Russell M. Nelson repeatedly taught that education is a “religious responsibility.”
“Fostering a deep desire to learn,” he counseled young Latter-day Saints on September 8, 2013. “There is no shortcut to excellence and ability.
President Nelson certainly did what he preached. As a world-renowned cardiac surgeon, he trained for 14 years before sending out the first bill for services. However, over his 29-year career, he performed thousands of surgeries and helped thousands more through his pioneering work on the first cardiopulmonary machine.
Many of his achievements were manifestations of his own “desire to learn” that can be seen throughout his life. As a boy, he obtained his library card and on weekends and summer days he would ride a streetcar ride at the Salt Lake Public Library in Downtown, pulling books from the shelf after the books. His appetite for learning and his innate intelligence often put him at the top of his class. He skipped fifth grade and graduated as a lawyer at East High School at the age of 16 (“Insights from the Life of the Prophet”, p. 12).
He decided to get a good education at a young age. In a lecture awarded to BYU-Idaho students in the winter of 2010, Nelson recalled at the time securing employment during the Christmas holiday as a teenager. “The job was boring, repetitive and monotonous,” he said. “It slowly passed every hour of the day. At that time I decided to get an education that qualifies for a more meaningful job in my life. I decided I would become a doctor of medicine.”
President Nelson was 22 years old and the first person in class when he graduated from the University of Utah in August 1947 with both a single bachelor’s degree and a medical degree. He was a member of the Honorary Scholars Association Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha.
He served as a residency in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded a doctorate. 1954. He also received his PhD in Science from Brigham Young University in 1970, a PhD in Medicine from Utah State University in 1989, and a PhD in Humanitarianism from Snow College in 1994.
But as a boy on a streetcar, a student, a heart surgeon, or a prophet of the Lord, President Nelson has shown him to be a curious and insatiable learner. President Jeffrey R. Holland, the 12 Apostle Quarter President, hypothesized that since Russell Nelson was born, he was intrigued not only by how things are ticking, but also by how they make them better (Church News/KSL Interview, January 9, 2018).
