Editor’s note: After a lifetime of dedicated service, President Russell M. Nelson died on Sept. 27, 2025, at age 101. This article is part of a series exploring different facets of President Nelson’s exemplary, faith-filled life.
President Russell M. Nelson repeatedly taught that education is “a religious responsibility.”
“Develop a deep desire to learn,” he counseled young Latter-day Saints in a devotional on Sept. 8, 2013. “There is no shortcut to excellence and competence. Education is the difference between wishing you could help other people and being able to help them.”
President Nelson certainly practiced what he preached. As a world-renowned heart surgeon, he trained for 14 years before sending his first bill for services. Yet over his 29-year career, he performed thousands of surgeries and helped thousands more through his pioneering work on the first heart-lung machine.
His many achievements were a manifestation of his own “deep desire to learn,” which can be seen throughout his life. As a boy, he acquired his own library card, and on weekends and summer days he would ride the streetcar to the Salt Lake Public Library downtown and pull book after book from the shelves. His appetite for learning plus his innate intellect often put him at the top of his class. He skipped the fifth grade and graduated as the valedictorian of East High School at the age of 16 (“Insights From a Prophet’s Life,” p. 12).
He resolved at a young age to gain a good education. In a talk given to BYU-Idaho students in winter 2010, then-Elder Nelson recalled securing employment on his Christmas break as a teenager. “The work was dull, repetitive and monotonous,” he said. “Each hour of the day passed slowly. I resolved then and there that I would obtain an education that would qualify me for more meaningful work in my life. I determined that I would become a doctor of medicine.”
When he graduated from the University of Utah in August 1947 with both his bachelor’s and medical degrees, he was 22 years old and the first in his class. He was a member of honorary scholastic societies Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha.
He served his residency in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and at the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1954. He also received honorary degrees of doctor of science from Brigham Young University in 1970, doctor of medical science from Utah State University in 1989 and doctor of humane letters from Snow College in 1994.
But whether as a boy riding the streetcar, a student, a heart surgeon or as the Lord’s Prophet, President Nelson showed he was a curious, insatiable learner. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles once posited that since Russell Nelson was born, he was intrigued by not only how things tick but how to make them tick better (Church News/KSL interview, Jan. 9, 2018).
