Ben Carson

Ben Carson (Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr., born 1951) is an American neurosurgeon who became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States in 1984, at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, when he was 33. He became widely known in 1987 as the leader of a surgical team that carried out the first known separation of conjoined twins who were joined at the back of the head. His reported surgical work also includes the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb, new methods for treating brain-stem tumors, and a revival of hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures. He wrote more than a hundred neurosurgical publications and retired from medicine in 2013, when he was professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010. After leaving medicine he moved into public life as an author, presidential candidate and later a United States cabinet secretary, which this entry records only as biographical context.