Laureates' Biographies
James LeVoy Sorenson
James LeVoy Sorenson is a renowned American entrepreneur who invented and produced many ingenious medical devices that are standard equipment in health care today. He is known foremost for developing the computerized heart monitor, which was the first device able to accurately monitor conditions inside a living human heart. Among Mr. Sorenson’s other inventions are the first disposable paper surgical mask, the first plastic venous catheter and the first blood recycling system for trauma and surgical procedures. With more than 40 medical patents, it is likely that a Sorenson medical innovation is at work in every operating room and intensive care unit in the United States.
Less well known than his accomplishments are the great personal obstacles Mr. Sorenson overcame. Born to Joseph LeVoy and Emma Blaser Sorenson in Rexburg, Idaho, in 1921, he was slow of speech and dyslexic. The family home was a tarpaper shack in Yuba City, California where his father moved to find employment digging ditches during the worst years of the Great Depression. With the support of family and through determination, young James worked his way through high school and served a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission. In 1946 he moved to Salt Lake City to sell pharmaceuticals to physicians. Here, Mr. Sorenson built a multi-million dollar investment portfolio of real estate, uranium claims and mining stocks during the post-World War II economic boom and then played a leading role in Deseret Pharmaceutical, Sorenson Research and Abbott Laboratories.
Though still engaged in leading the Sorenson family of companies, Mr. Sorenson is also busy working on the project that will be his biggest philanthropic legacy: The non-profit Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation. By compiling world genealogy information and correlating it with the DNA it came from, the foundation intends to create the world’s largest database of human heredity, which will forever change the way ancestry research is done. It is Mr. Sorenson's belief that once people understand how closely related they are to each other, they will be motivated to treat each other better.
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