Dr. Keith Black

From a segregated elementary school in Alabama, Keith Black emerged as an award-winning scientific prodigy, practicing transplant surgery on laboratory animals and publishing his first scientific paper while still in his teens. In medical school, he discovered his life's passion, the human brain. Although it is famously regarded as the most difficult specialty in medicine, Keith Black has excelled in brain surgery, not only through his fantastic dexterity, but through a series of visionary discoveries that have revolutionized the treatment of brain cancer. Among other innovations, he identified the compound that enables chemotherapeutic drugs to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, and pioneered a vaccine-like treatment to mobilize the body's immune response against cancers of the brain. In little more than 20 years, Keith Black has performed over 5,000 brain tumor operations, extracting cancers so inaccessible that other surgeons had dismissed them as inoperable. Patients from all over the world come to Dr. Black's facility at Cedars-Sinai, to be treated by the man they regard as a miracle worker. This podcast was recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1999 Summit in Washington, D.C.