Dr. John Aidan Carney was born in Ballaghadereen, County Roscommon, Republic of Ireland, in 1934. He attended boarding school at Clongowes Wood College, Naas, County Kildare, and subsequently medical school at University College, Dublin, graduating with honors M.B., B.Ch, and B.A.O. degrees in 1959. In medical school, he received several University Scholarships and the Bellingham Gold Medal in Clinical Medicine. To pursue his interest in pathology, he emigrated to the United States in 1962 and began a residency in pathology at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota. During his training, he was awarded the Donald Balfour Alumni Award for Meritorious Research for his study of the morphology of cardiac myosin. In 1966, he joined the Mayo Clinic Department of Surgical Pathology as a consultant; in 1969, he received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota; and in 1984, he attained the rank of Professor of Pathology in the Mayo Medical School. Dr. Carney has spent his entire career at Mayo Clinic. Throughout, he worked as a full-time general surgical pathologist and cytologist, without formal time for research or grant support.

In the early 1970s, he began studying the multiple endocrine neoplasia syndromes. Later, his interests expanded to include many other systems in the body, as his writings attest. It could be said of him that he is a generalist rather than a specialist, and the designation "investigative pathologist" probably best describes him because of his wide and deep interests. His work suggests that he believes that there is still much to be learned by ingenious association, using the old, simple, and tested toolsthe patient's history, the physical examination, basic laboratory tests, gross pathology, light microscopy, and the oldest of computers, the human brain. He has shared his knowledge prolifically in book chapters, editorials, 120 abstracts and posters, and 180 articles, published in a wide range of journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Medicine, American Journal of Medical Genetics, Nature Genetics, and all the major pathology journals. The articles feature the original descriptions of 3 syndromes (Carney triad, Carney complex, and Carney syndrome), 5 tumors (primary pigmented nodular adrenal disease, hyalinizing trabecular adenoma of the thyroid gland, psammomatous melanotic schwannoma, epithelioid blue nevus, and osteochrondromyxoma of bone), 2 medical conditions (palpation thyroiditis and amiodarone-induced thyropathy), and important amplification of certain established tumors, including cardiac myxoma and pheochromocytoma (the differences between the nonfamilial and familial types of the neoplasms), cutaneous myxoma (the significance of its eyelid and external ear canal localization), and certain mammary myxoid lesions (their association with the Carney complex).

Dr. Carney's classic clinicopathologic studies are major contributions by a pathologist to the field of Medicine. These studies resulted from his original, imaginative and creative thinking combined with great perseverance and an ability to conceptualize and synthesize. They show the importance of intuition, risk-taking, time investment and doing whatever is necessary to get as close to the truth as possible. A keen observer, Dr. Carney has paid meticulous attention to clinical and pathological detail. Much of his success has been due to his ability as a detective, sleuthing clinical or pathological clues, and pursuing crucial patients throughout the world. He has particularly enjoyed his meetings in the United States and abroad with "orphan" patients who have rare or undescribed disorders and who express great relief on learning after years of increasing anxiety that they were not medical freaksthat there were other patients like them.

Dr. Carney must be particularly proud of the vindication of his hunch that there was a syndromic connection between primary pigmented nodular adrenal disease and cardiac myxoma. He pursued this notion with indefatigable energy, apparently "certain" that the connection must exist, and to exhaustive lengths, until after 2 years of searching he finally found a patient who had both conditions. The disorder was later defined more broadly as "the complex of spotty pigmentation, myxomas, endocrine overactivity and schwannomas" (the Carney complex). Subsequently, Dr. Carney showed that the complex was a Mendelian dominant disorder, and recently participated in discovery of mutated forms of the gene (protein kinase A, regulatory type subunit 1±) that cause the condition in some families.

Dr. Carney's goal has been to develop clinical and pathological information that can be relied on and to identify cohorts of patients that were appropriate (pure) for genetic analysis. Many of the disorders he described are so rare that even the vast numbers of records at Mayo Clinic contain only a few examples. Consequently, his searches for patients have spanned the globe and the decades, in some instances going back more than half a century and, in the case of Minnie G. (Harvey Cushing's first patient with the Cushing syndrome) to 1910. With typical tenacity, he obtained follow-up data in 1999 from a patient domiciled in Babylon, Iraq, at the height of the United Nations embargo. This contact gave him an almost unbelievable follow-up success rate of 100% for 79 patients, from around the world, with the Carney triad (gastric stromal sarcoma, pulmonary chondroma and extra-adrenal paraganglioma). Dr. Carney's achievements have been recognized by the use of his name as eponym for syndromes that he described; by his election to honorary membership of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeon, the Lawson Wilkins Society of Pediatric Endocrinology, and l'Association Francophone de Chirugie Edocrienne; by the awarding of the M.D. degree by the National University of Ireland in 1978 and the Fred Stewart Medal by Memorial Hospital, New York, in 2000; by admission to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 1985; and selection as the Peter Heimann Lecturer for the International Association of Endocrine Surgeons in 2001.