BY Karen Bryant
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal

  Greenville native Dr. Robert Elliott will likely be included on the list of the most brilliant, phenomenally successful people the Delta has produced. Founder of Elliott Mastology Center and Research Institute in Baton Rouge and a pioneer in breast cancer research and treatment, Elliott has patents on a vaccine for breast cancer, one for prostate cancer and one on a process that could revolutionize gene therapy. He believes he owes it all to divine intervention. Elliott recalls Greenville during his childhood in the 1930s as "a great place to live. It was the retail center of the Delta, and the whole town was like a big family," he says, also praising the public school system and his teachers.
  His discovered his interest in medicine when he was about 15 years old. "I had friend who'd fallen out of a truck and got a hematoma of the brain. He was taken to Jackson and then to Memphis for neurosurgery," says Elliott. "That was the first time I felt my calling to become a physician."
  But he was a self-described "jock," with no interest in studying too hard; he was scared to follow his dream. Elliott finished high school and went on to Delta State University along with Walter Shurden, a classmate and fellow football player. Elliott had chosen accounting as his major. An uncle, who was an accountant, had promised Elliott a job after college.
Elliott, though, wasn't happy. He recalls being fascinated with the science building and watching the pre-med students come and go. "I wanted to be there. I wanted to do it, but I wasn't committed."
  At the end of his freshman year, Elliott was driving to back to campus after the weekend with Shurden. Elliott says Shurden, a hardy partier, was not acting himself. "He told me he'd had a dream. He had never gone to church but said he had heard a voice calling him, telling him that he was going to be a preacher." Today, Shurden is chair of Roberts Department of Christianity and Callaway Professor of Christianity  at Mercer University in Macon, GA.
  "I had no idea of the kind of commitment that he would have to a life of health care," says Shurden. "And, I have followed his vocation from afar, I have recognized that he has just achieved famously. I'm certainly not surprised at his achievement in terms of this intellect or his social skills. When we were in high school, he was a football player who had sense. And he's proven to be a guy with enormous sense. That spiritual experience we had our freshman year, just turned our lives around and made all the difference."
  The two began going to Bible study; then the two had what Elliott describes as a spiritual experience in their dorm room one night. After that, Elliott's course was set. "Everything changed. I began to work hard. I changed my major and signed up for all the classes. I was in a hurry and wanted to get all in in three years," he recalls. "I was lucky enough to get those courses and after my third year of college I got into medical school. After the first quarter of pre-med I made all Bs, but after that I made all As. I learned how to study and worked hard. I led my class in med school the entire four years." He attended medical school at the University of Mississippi, where he won awards for his academic achievements.
  At this point, Elliott still had not settled on a specialty. "I liked everything," he says. He considered orthopedics and a career in academic medicine. He took a rotating internship at University Hospital in Jackson and was accepted into the integrated general and thoracic surgery residency. The chief of surgery there at the time, Dr. James D. Hardy, recognized Elliott's abilities and sent Elliott to Washington University's Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for a fellowship in anatomy, pathology and electron microscopy. "That was one of the most exciting years of my life," says Elliott, who met and was influenced by some of the top professionals in medicine. His experience there, says Elliott, "is probably why I am doing what I am today." After completing his general surgery and thoracic residency, Elliott says he became disillusioned about academic medicine. But in 1967 he met Dr. Henry Laws at the Southeastern Surgical Conference in Miami. Laws had a family practice in Anniston, Ala., and invited Elliott to come for a job interview.
  Elliott visited Anniston and was so impressed with the town and the medical facilities that he joined Laws in practice. It was there that Elliott's breast treatment practice began to grow. "This was in the 1970s. There was a specialist in almost every discipline except breast [treatment]. Breast patients fell somewhere between general surgery and medical oncology, which had just come on the scene. Few were doing chemotherapy, and I saw the need for it. That got on my mind. Lying in bed, I would hear a voice telling me to start a breast center. It wouldn't leave me alone."
  He broke the news to Laws, who admitted he also had plans to move on. Laws is now Caraway Methodist Hospital in Birmingham Elliott and Laws separated their practice amicably. Elliott left right away, choosing Baton Rouge to start a breast center.
  He recalls having to face some difficult times treading ground that had never been trod before. "I had to fight a lot of damn battles and turf wars. I got a mammography machine. I did my own chemotherapy, and people didn't like that. A lot of that has subsided now," he says. The badly needed center grew, and in 1982 started his first lab doing basic research.
  By 1986 Elliott's research center had a full time Ph.D. and a fellowship program. "We now have three research fellows from China," says Elliott.  In addition to the mastology center, Elliott's building houses an inpatient surgery center, the offices of the American Mastology Association, a national organization that Elliott formed, and the Elliott Mastology Research Institute.
Besides directing his work at one of the country's leading treatment and teaching facilities for diseases of the breast, Elliott travels across the United States and Europe teaching state-of-the-art procedures designed to save the lives of thousand of women. He is renowned as an international authority on breast diseases. He is a lecturer, teacher, mentor and surgeon who continues his unrelenting pursuit of a cure for breast cancer. He has hundreds of publications to his credit and in 1994 published a book, Breast Cancer: Anger at the Enemy, which is his own account of how he came to make his fight against breast cancer his life and passion and he remembers his roots.
  Since 1992 Elliott has conducted the Elliott-Nowell-White Science Symposium at DSU, which is a two-day learning session that brings in renowned guest speakers and pioneers in medicine. "Students can interact with famous scientists," says Elliott. He also gives scholarships to the school and offers an annual 10-week internship at his Baton Rouge center.
  Elliott himself says he's always known he was destined to do something important with his life. "Ever since I was five or six years old, I've always felt like there was a voice inside me, a higher power, telling me I was something special," he says.
He recalls a trip to Las Vegas he made in 1961 after he'd completed medical school. He was with a friend who asked him what he was going to do with his life. "I said, I'm going to win the Nobel Prize," says Elliott.
  With the staggering implications of the research Elliott has done already, he's sure to go down in history. If a Nobel Prize is also bestowed on him, no one familiar with the man and his work will be surprised. Still, Elliott hopes he will be known simply as a surgeon who answered God's call for a lifetime of service in health care for women.