My Seven Years of Silence with Rokea el-Azhary, M.D., Ph.D. (2024)

Pages: 100; Printing: Amazon Kindle Direct; Editing: Marjorie Toensing

Dr. Rokea el-Azhary contacted me in May 2023 shortly after one of her Mayo Clinic colleagues, Audrey Nelson, suggested that I help her write her memoir. (I had helped Dr. Nelson write her life story, which she published in 2021).  Rokea and I met in June 2023 to begin working together and published My Seven Years of Silence on Amazon a year later.  

My Seven Years of Silence is the untold story behind a courageous doctor and a world-famous clinic as they fought to ensure that corporations cannot overreach their profit goals at the expense of human knowledge.

In April 2005, Dr. Rokea el-Azhary—a dermatologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota—received  a phone call from their in-house attorney. He informed her that she and Mayo were being sued by Prometheus, a specialty pharmaceutical company. Prometheus was claiming that Rokea’s research had infringed on their patents. Thus began a series of court decisions and appeals that ended in 2012 with the Supreme Court voting unanimously in Rokea’s favor. Rokea looks back on those years, from 2005 to 2012, as the most stressful chapter of her personal and professional life. She was uncertain of the outcome and weathered one storm after another.

Dr. Rokea el-Azhary, M.D., Ph.D. earned her Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Minnesota and her medical degree from Baylor University Medical School in Houston, Texas. She began her residency at the world-famous Mayo Clinic in 1987 and joined the Clinic's staff in 1991. The author of more than 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, Dr. el-Azhary served as editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Dermatology from 2014 through 2023. She retired from Mayo Clinic as Professor Emeritus in 2020. 

“Rokea el-Azhary provides a witness’s eye-view of one of the most famous patent cases in U.S. history. Her book is a needed and valuable account of how patents—and lawsuits to enforce them—affect those in the medical profession. An engaging read!” —Jonathan Singer 

 (Jonathan is the lead attorney who represented Mayo Clinic in the case Mayo Collaborative Services vs. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. for eight years in the U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He is recognized as one of the top life sciences and intellectual property attorneys in the country. His efforts have resulted in numerous awards including Minnesota Attorney of the Year in 2012  for the Mayo case and, later, the California Attorney of the Year.)