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Benjamin Solomon Carson was born on Sept. 18, 1951, in Detroit, Michigan. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he lived with his mother and brother first in Boston and then back in Detroit. He was a poor academic student in elementary school until his mother began to limit his television watching and had him read two books a week and write book reports.

In 2008, Pres. George W. Bush awarded Carson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2009 a movie about Carson's life, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story premiered on television. Carson was the author of an autobiography, Gifted Hands (1990), written with Cecil Murphey, as well as several motivational books.

In 1983 Carson moved to Perth, Australia, to work as a chief neurosurgery resident at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. After a year spent gaining experience, he returned to Johns Hopkins, where he was named director of pediatric neurosurgery. There he earned a reputation for dealing with difficult cases using advanced surgical methods. In 1985 he performed his first successful hemispherectomy, a procedure that removes part of the brain in order to control chronic seizures. He also became known for his work separating conjoined twins, in 1987 completing the first successful separation of craniopagus twins (joined at the head).

From the Academy of Achievement autobiographical interview:

We had to stay in the house and read these books and our friends were outside and they were playing and they knew we couldn't come out. It seems like they would be making just that much more noise to torment us. But, I hated it for the first several weeks, but then all of a sudden, I started to enjoy it because we had no money, but between the covers of those books, I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything. And, I began to learn how to use my imagination more because it doesn't really require a lot of imagination to watch television, but it does to read. You've got to take those letters and make them into words, and those words into sentences, and those sentences into concepts, and the more you do that, the more vivid your imagination becomes. And, I believe that's probably one of the reasons that you see that creative people tend to be readers, because they're exercising their mind.

I was reading about people in laboratories, pouring chemicals from a beaker into a flask and watching the steam rise, and completing electrical circuits, and discovering galaxies, and looking at microcosms in the microscope, and I just acquired so much knowledge, and I had put myself into those settings and I saw myself differently than everybody else in my environment who just wanted to get out of school so they could get some cool clothes and a cool car. And, I was looking down the pike and seeing myself as a scientist or a physician or something of that nature, and that was one of the things that sort of carried me through much of the ridicule and some of the hardships that a person would have to go through coming from my environment and going to medical school.

The thing that I am probably the most proud of is not all the medical accomplishments or honorary degrees or various boards and societies. I'm most proud of the 100,000-plus letters that I have from young people, throughout America and around the world, whose lives have been changed by reading one of my books, or seeing me on television, or an interview in a magazine, and recognizing that they have the ability to define their own lives. If that's the legacy that I leave, I'll be very happy.

I was talking to a friend of mine, who was a cardiothoracic surgeon, who was the chief of the division, and I said, "You guys operate on the heart in babies, how do you keep them from exsanguinating" and he says, "Well, we put them in hypothermic arrest." I said, "Is there any reason that—if we were doing a set of Siamese twins that were joined at the head—that we couldn't put them into hypothermic arrest, at the appropriate time, when we're likely to lose a lot of blood?" and he said, "No." I said, "Wow, this is great." Then I said, "Why am I putting my time into this? I'm not going to see any Siamese twins." So I kind of forgot about it, and lo and behold, two months later, along came these doctors from Germany, presenting this case of Siamese twins. And, I was asked for my opinion, and I then began to explain the techniques that should be used, and how we would incorporate hypothermic arrest, and everybody said "Wow! That sounds like it might work." And, my colleagues and I, a few of us went over to Germany. We looked at the twins. We actually put in scalp expanders, and five months later we brought them over and did the operation, and lo and behold, it worked.