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1924-09-09 · Salt Lake City, Utah · Male

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Russell Marion Nelson Sr. (September 9, 1924 – September 27, 2025) was an American religious leader and surgeon who was the seventeenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 2018 until his death in 2025. Before becoming church president, Nelson was a member of its Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for nearly thirty-four years and was the quorum president from 2015 to 2018. As church president, Nelson was recognized by the church as the prophet, seer, and revelator.

A native of Salt Lake City, Nelson attended the University of Utah for his undergraduate and medical school education. He then did his medical residency and earned a PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he was a member of the research team of Clarence Dennis that in 1951 pioneered the first human open-heart surgery using cardiopulmonary bypass. After serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, Nelson returned to Salt Lake City and accepted a professorship at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He spent the next twenty-nine years working in the field of cardiothoracic surgery. Nelson became a noted heart surgeon and served as president of the Society for Vascular Surgery and the Utah Medical Association.

Nelson served in a variety of lay LDS Church leadership positions during his surgical career, beginning locally in Salt Lake City and then as the church's Sunday School general president from 1971 to 1979. In 1984, Nelson and jurist Dallin H. Oaks were selected to fill two vacancies in the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Living to the age of 101, Nelson was the oldest president in the church’s history.

Early life and education

Nelson was born on September 9, 1924, at Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Floss Edna (née Anderson) and Marion Clavar Nelson. He had two sisters, Marjory and Enid, and a brother, Robert. Nelson's father was a reporter for the Deseret News and later became general manager of Gillham Advertising, Utah's earliest advertising agency. His parents were not active in the Latter-day Saint faith while he was a youth, but they did send him to Sunday school, and he was baptized a member of the church at age sixteen.

Nelson studied at LDS Business College in his mid-teens (concurrently with high school enrollment) and worked as an assistant secretary at a bank. He graduated from East High School at age sixteen and enrolled at the University of Utah, where he was a member of the Beta Epsilon chapter of Sigma Chi and Owl and Key. He graduated in 1945 with a bachelor's degree and Phi Beta Kappa membership. He then attended the University of Utah School of Medicine, graduating with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1947, ranked first in his class. He began his first year of medical school while still an undergraduate, and he completed the four-year MD program in only three years.

After medical school, Nelson went to the University of Minnesota for his medical residency. He became a member of the research team of surgeon Clarence Dennis developing the heart-lung machine that in April 1951 supported the first human open-heart surgery using cardiopulmonary bypass. Nelson received a Ph.D. from Minnesota in 1954 for his research contributions.

Medical career

Nelson served a two-year term of duty in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, and was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. While on duty, he was assigned to a research group formed by the commandant of the graduate school at Walter Reed, Col. William S. Stone, and led by Fiorindo A. Simeone, a professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who had been a clinical investigator in the Mediterranean Theater during World War II. This team was focused on ways to improve the treatment of the wounded, and was sent to all five MASH units active in Korea along with two major evacuation hospitals, several field station hospitals, a prisoner of war camp and larger evacuation hospitals in Japan, Hawaii, and the mainland United States in order to implement such improvements. At one point, the team came close enough to the front that they received fire from enemy artillery positions, which missed them. After 20 months in service, he left active duty at the rank of captain. Following his military service, he did a year of work and surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1955, Nelson returned to Salt Lake City and accepted a faculty position at the University of Utah School of Medicine. There he built his own heart-lung bypass machine and used it to support the first open-heart surgery in the United States west of the Mississippi River. That operation was performed at the Salt Lake General Hospital (SLGH, later University of Utah Hospital) on an adult with an atrial septal defect. Nelson was the third surgeon in the United States to perform an open-heart operation successfully. Nelson was also the director of the University of Utah thoracic surgery residency program.

In March 1956, he performed the first successful pediatric cardiac operation at the SLGH, a total repair of tetralogy of Fallot in a four-year-old girl. He was at the forefront of surgeons focusing attention on coronary artery disease, and contributed to the advance of valvular surgery as well. In 1960, he performed one of the first-ever repairs of tricuspid valve regurgitation. His patient was a Latter-day Saint stake patriarch. He also provided the first surgical intervention for tricuspid regurgitation, a disorder that allows blood to flow backward into the right upper heart chamber. In an indication of his surgical skill, a 1968 case series of his aortic valve replacements demonstrated an exceptionally low peri-operative mortality. Later, he performed the same operation on future church president Spencer W. Kimball, replacing his damaged aortic valve. In 1985, Nelson along with his colleague, Conrad B. Jenson, performed a quadruple bypass surgery on the Chinese opera performer Fang Rongxiang (1925–1989).

Nelson first operated out of the University of Utah's medical school. He later had a practice at the Salt Lake Clinic with admission privileges at LDS Hospital. In 1964, he set up his own private practice with him as the lead and Conrad Jenson as an associate. In 1966, Nelson became head of the thoracic residency program that combined resources from the University of Utah Medical School, LDS Hospital, Primary Children's Hospital and the VA Hospital in Salt Lake City.

In 1965, the University of Chicago offered Nelson the position as head of their department of thoracic surgery. Dallin H. Oaks, then a law professor at Chicago and a fellow Latter-day Saint, actively worked to recruit Nelson. However, after consulting with church president David O. McKay, Nelson turned down the offer.

Nelson became involved with the administrative aspects of medicine and was elected president of the Utah State Medical Association. He was chair of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at LDS Hospital.

In 1981, Nelson held appointments as a visiting professor of surgery at the National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City and the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. In May 1982, he was a visiting professor at the Hospital de Clinicas in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Nelson was honored nationally by being elected president of the Society for Vascular Surgery for the year 1975. He was also a director of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery. Nelson traveled extensively as a medical doctor and addressed conferences in many parts of Latin America and Africa, as well as in India and China. He performed a total of nearly 7,000 operations before his call to be an apostle.

In 2015, the University of Utah, along with the American College of Cardiology, created the Russell M. Nelson, MD, PhD, Visiting Professorship in Cardiothoracic Surgery.

LDS Church service

In addition to his medical work, Nelson served frequently as a leader in the…