Russell M. Nelson

Russell Marion Nelson was an American heart surgeon who later became a religious leader, born in Salt Lake City on 9 September 1924 and dead on 27 September 2025. He took his medical degree at the University of Utah in 1947, ranked first in his class, and did his residency and earned a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, where he was on the research team of Clarence Dennis that developed the heart-lung machine used in the first human open-heart operation with cardiopulmonary bypass in 1951. After army service in the Korean War he returned to Salt Lake City in 1955, built his own bypass machine and supported the first open-heart operation west of the Mississippi River. He performed a pioneering repair of tetralogy of Fallot in a child in 1956, one of the first repairs of tricuspid regurgitation in 1960, and aortic valve replacements with very low mortality. He directed the thoracic surgery residency program at Utah and was president of the Society for Vascular Surgery in 1975. His surgical career of twenty-nine years was followed by service as an apostle and, from 2018, as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.