Richard & Lily Weinshilboum: A dramatic first date leads to a lifetime of love for music and MPR

May 13, 2025

Lily Weinshilboum
Lily Weinshilboum
Provided by Richard Weinshilboum

For Lily Weinshilboum, the youngest of 11 children, childhood was a series of departures. Born and raised in Guangzhou, China, she grew up as WWII broke out. Her memories included the Japanese bombing her home town, a coastal city. Her father owned a hotel in Canton but, as her husband Richard shared, “the Communists took it over and her family moved to Taiwan.”

At a time when very few Chinese students came to the United States to be educated, she dreamed of traveling to get her education. She was accepted by a Baptist college in Kansas so, at age 18, she crossed the Pacific alone to begin her collegiate experience. Lily earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from Ottawa University.

Representatives of the University of Kansas Medical School were recruiting graduate students just as she was about to graduate. She joined the PhD. Program in Anatomy at KU and eventually taught anatomy at the Mayo Medical School.

Richard said , “I met her when she was the graduate student instructor for my medical school anatomy class—but I did not ask her for a date until after I had passed the course.”

Richard shared, “I grew up  in Augusta, Kansas with a population of about 3,000 people. At the University of Kansas Medical School I learned that people generously donate their bodies to teach medical students about anatomy. The cadavers are in tanks, and there were four students for  the tank, two on each side.The other three students with me all went into psychiatry, and they were not very interested in anatomy. She insisted that we were behaving like small children, so she brought us cookies and milk in for us. She was so kind.”

“I was smart enough not to ask her for a date while she was my teacher. However, I realized that she studied

in the library, so I drifted by the table where she was studying, and said something like, can I buy you a cup of coffee. Her response was, I don't drink coffee. She didn't make it easy.

At that time, I didn't know that there is a common gene variant in Chinese people and alcohol makes them sick. On our first date, I took her to a nice Italian restaurant in Kansas City. Wanting to be sophisticated, I ordered red wine. Because she was on a date, she took a sip. At which point her face turned bright red, her heart rate went up to 160 a minute. I thought that I had killed her on the first date!”

‘Eventually we were married and left for Harvard, where I did my residency in internal medicine. It was during the Vietnam War, so the options were:

  • you could be a general medical officer in the Mekong Delta;

  • you could volunteer to be a physician on an Indian reservation;

  • or you could compete for a position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“I interviewed at NIH. There was one man I thought was wonderful, Dr. Julius Axelrod. Dr. Axelrod discovered the neural membrane reuptake mechanism in our brains that take up neurotransmitter and that discovery made it possible to design Prozac. Prozac blocks the mechanism that he discovered and made more of these “neurotransmitters” available in the brain to treat diseases like depression. Dr. Axelrod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine while I was in his lab”.

Subsequently, at Mayo, Dr. Weinshilboum's research program studies the role of inheritance in variation in patient drug response, using genomics. Lily taught anatomy at the Mayo Medical School for 25 years.

Lily Weinshilboum
Lily Weinshilboum
Provided by Richard Weinshilboum

Lily had a series of passions—for education, for music and for Chinese brush stroke painting. She helped found the Minnesota Ming Chiao Chapter of the Sumi-e Society of America—a group formed to introduce a broader audience to Chinese Art.

Minnesota Public Radio was something that Lily loved, particularly classical music. One of the items that she brought with her on the boat to come to college was a portable radio. It was the one she used to listen to classical music when she was a young girl in Taiwan. “That radio is still in our house. It's tuned to Minnesota Public Radio. When Lily would get up in the morning she would listen to MPR before she went downstairs to get ready to go to work.”

Generosity and gratitude have been consistent aspects of their life together. “She insisted that we create a gift to Ottowa University for foreign students, which we did up until she passed away.” The couple also supported the renovation of the University of Kansas Medical School anatomy lab where they first met.

Now, after consulting with their two children, Richard has made their largest gift, a $500,000 endowment to support YourClassical and to help young people fall in love with classical music in the same way that Lily did. The gift will come in five payments of $100,000 and is part of their estate giving.

“I always figured she'd be around long after I'd be gone, and that she'd would be there on into the future. As I told you, she was the youngest of 11 children, most of them women, and all of those women lived into their nineties. I was sure that I'd be gone, but she'd be here. This is exactly the gift that she would want and appreciate.”