Dr. J. Robert Cade
Physician, Scientist, Musician, Inventor
The Cade Museum for Innovation and Invention is named for Dr. James Robert Cade, a professor of renal (kidney) medicine at the University of Florida and the lead inventor of the sports drink Gatorade.
Though he is most widely remembered for Gatorade, he was a man of many parts; a true Renaissance man. On the title page of his autobiography, Freut Euch Des Lebens (Take Joy in Life) Cade described himself as a "physician, scientist, musician, and inventor." At the time of his death in 2007, Cade had a collection of over 30 violins, (some of them dating to the 17th century) and over 60 Studebaker carriages and automobiles from the late 1800's to 1965.
He was also an accomplished writer and poet. "Great poetry," Cade once wrote, "combines music, emotion and intellect in a way nothing else can." He often quoted his favorite line from Tennyson's Ulysses "I am part of all that I have met; yet all experience is an arch where through gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades forever when I move."
"Wouldn't it be great," he observed, "if we could all remember that we come away from each new experience... a different person? We are changed by each experience just as each person we react with is changed by us; that each new encounter frames the arch through which we see our world and therefore shapes what we will do and will become."
Many people certainly were changed by Cade's numerous inventions and ideas, which in addition to Gatorade included the first shock-dissipating football helmet, a high-protein milkshake used by surgical patients, athletes, and cancer patients, and a new method for treating autism and schizophrenia through diet modification.
Dr. Cade was also a man of great faith. A lifelong Lutheran, he was the 1991 recipient of the Wittenberg Award and gave generously to many Lutheran colleges and organizations. His Christian beliefs inspired and informed everything he did, including his scientific research, hobbies, and friendships with people from all walks of life. In the last years of his life he and his wife Mary established and endowed the Gloria Dei Foundation, a small grant-giving organization focused primarily on the needs of the poor and underserved.
Cade was born on September 26, 1927 in San Antonio, Texas. After service in the Navy at the end of World War II, he attended school at the University of Texas from 1948-1950. In 1953 he married Mary (Strasburger) Cade, a nurse from Dallas. In 1961, after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University Hospital in New York City, Dr. Cade took a position at the University of Florida medical school, where he remained the rest of his life. Together he and Mary raised six children and helped raise twenty grandchildren. Dr. Cade died in Gainesville on November 27, 2007.