Super Surgeon

By Christine Gorman

An operation to remove half a child's brain sounds like something that only a mad--not to mention sadistic--scientist would dream up. And yet Dr. Benjamin Solomon Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, Md., is neither insane nor cruel. His reason for performing the surgery--known as a hemispherectomy--is quite compelling. For young patients with rare seizure disorders, it is often their best chance of living a more nearly normal life.

Until Carson and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins came along, however, hemispherectomies had largely been abandoned because they so frequently resulted in death. He dramatically increased the chances of success by developing several new surgical techniques. Among them: minimizing the amount of injury to the brain by removing sections a little at a time rather than all at once, and better ways of controlling bleeding and inflammation.

Overcoming long odds is something of a hallmark for Carson. Apart from reviving the hemispherectomy, he is world-renowned for his skill at successfully separating Siamese twins joined at the head. But as inspiring as Carson's surgical achievements may be, they almost pale before the story of his life. For if Carson had not gone to medical school, he might just as easily have landed in jail.

Carson grew up poor in Detroit in the 1950s, and when he was eight, his parents divorced. After he nearly failed the fifth grade, his mother moved swiftly to intervene. She sharply restricted television viewing time for him and his older brother Curtis and required them to submit weekly reports on books they had read (Carson's first: Chip the Dam Builder). It wasn't until years later that the brothers learned that their mother, who left school after third grade, could barely read what they wrote.

Her intervention succeeded. Carson soon advanced to the top of his class and dreamed of becoming a doctor. There was a problem, however. As a teenager, Carson would explode with rage whenever he was crossed. One day, while he was listening to the radio, a friend changed the station without his permission. Carson went berserk and tried to shove a knife into the other boy's stomach.

Fortunately, the blade broke off on the boy's belt buckle. Horrified by what he had almost done, Carson locked himself in the bathroom. "I started reading the Book of Proverbs," Carson recalls. "When I came out three hours later, I had a different view of the world."

That view includes strong ideas about the duty of physicians to heal more than just the body. In 1994 Carson and his wife Candy created a scholarship fund for top students in Grades 4 through 12. "I find that in a lot of schools, kids think it's not cool to be smart," Carson says. He would like young scholars to get some of the limelight that's usually trained on athletes.

Meanwhile, back in his lab, Carson is trying to develop new treatments for a type of cancer called brain-stem glioma. The tumor's location makes surgery difficult and prospects for survival bleak. But those are exactly the kinds of odds that Carson has faced before and beaten.