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Russell Marion Nelson Sr. (born September 9, 1924) is an American religious leader and former surgeon who is the 17th and current president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Nelson was a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for nearly 34 years, and was the quorum president from 2015 to 2018. As church president, Nelson is accepted by the church as a prophet, seer, and revelator.

A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, Nelson attended the University of Utah for his undergraduate and medical school education. He then did further surgical training and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, where he worked on the research team developing the heart-lung machine that in 1951 supported the first ever human open-heart surgery using mechanical takeover of heart and lungs (cardiopulmonary bypass). He served for two years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, then did a year of surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1955, Nelson returned to Salt Lake City and accepted a professorship at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He spent the next 29 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 also served in a variety of lay LDS leadership positions during his surgical career, beginning locally in Salt Lake City and then as the LDS Church's Sunday School General President from 1971 to 1979. In 1984, Nelson and the American jurist Dallin H. Oaks were selected to fill the two vacancies in the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles created by the deaths of LeGrand Richards and Mark E. Petersen. LDS apostles serve for life, and so Nelson retired from all of his prior professional positions.

Early life and education
Russell M. Nelson was born on September 9, 1924, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Marion Clavar Nelson (1897–1990) and his wife, Floss Edna Nelson (née Anderson; 1893–1983). Marion C. Nelson was a reporter for the Deseret News and later general manager of Gillham Advertising Agency. Nelson has two sisters, Marjory E. (1920–2016) and Enid (b. 1926), and a brother, Robert H. (1931–2014). Nelson's 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 LDS Church at age 16.

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 high school at age 16, then enrolled at the University of Utah. He earned a B.A. in 1945 and an M.D. in 1947. Nelson began his first year of medical school prior to finishing his bachelor's degree, and completed the four-year M.D. program in only three years of study.

After completing medical school, Nelson went to the University of Minnesota for surgical training and doctoral studies. He received a Ph.D. in 1951, and worked on the research team responsible for developing the heart-lung machine that in March 1951 supported the first-ever human open-heart surgery using cardiopulmonary bypass. He served a two-year term of duty in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Korean War, and was stationed in Korea, Japan, and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He then did a year of work and surgical training at Harvard Medical School's Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Medical career
Nelson returned to Salt Lake City in 1955 and accepted a faculty position at the University of Utah School of Medicine. There he built his own heart-lung bypass machine and employed it to support the first open-heart surgery in the state of Utah. During this time, Nelson was also the director of the University of Utah thoracic surgery residency program.

This would mark the first of many career achievements for Nelson. 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. 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 LDS 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 (方荣翔); 1925–1989).

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 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.

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.

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

Early Church service
In addition to his medical work, Nelson served frequently as a leader in the LDS Church. In his early adult years he served in several callings, including as a counselor in bishoprics and as a member of a stake high council. Before being appointed an apostle, he served as a stake president in Salt Lake City from 1964 to 1971, with Joseph B. Wirthlin serving as his second counselor. Nelson also served for eight years as the church's Sunday School General President, and four years as a regional representative.

LDS Apostle
Nelson was called as an apostle by church president Spencer W. Kimball, to whom he had served as a personal physician for many years. Nelson was sustained as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on April 7, 1984, during the church's general conference. He was ordained an apostle on April 12, 1984, by Gordon B. Hinckley. At the same conference, Dallin H. Oaks was sustained as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. Nelson and Oaks filled the vacancies in the Quorum created by the deaths of LeGrand Richards and Mark E. Petersen. Early in his service as an apostle, Nelson was an adviser to the church's Young Women organization and was supportive of the developing of the Young Women values and Personal Progress program.

In 1991, Nelson served as the negotiator for the LDS Church with the Internal Revenue Service over whether contributions to support missionaries serving would be tax deductible. In 1992, he was the church's lead delegate to the Parliament on World Religions. For a time he was also the church's representative to a US State Department committee on international religious freedom.

Nelson's assignments as an apostle have included supervisory responsibility for the LDS Church in Africa. In 2009, he, along with his wife and others, were attacked while in Mozambique. He also made several other visits to that continent, including one to Kenya in 2011.

From 2007 to 2015, Nelson was as a member of the Church Boards of Trustees/Education, the governing body of the Church Educational System, and the chairman of its Executive Committee. He was succeeded as chairman of the Executive Committee by Oaks.

Following the death of Boyd K. Packer on July 3, 2015, Nelson became the most senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve and the quorum's president. Nelson was set apart as the quorum president on July 15, 2015, by Thomas S. Monson.

Nelson made his first international trip as quorum president to Central America from August 20–31, 2015. The following month, Nelson dedicated the renovated Aaronic Priesthood Restoration Site in Pennsylvania, where LDS Church members believe the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods were restored.

Eastern Europe
After Monson's call to the First Presidency in 1985, Nelson was assigned as the apostle to oversee the work of the church in Eastern Europe. In this assignment, he worked closely with Dennis B. Neuenschwander and Hans B. Ringger. Nelson was involved in the first meetings between LDS Church leaders and government officials of Bulgaria, Romania, and the Soviet Union, and worked to continue LDS expansion and recognition efforts in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.

In August 2010, Nelson journeyed to the dedication of the Kiev Ukraine Temple. Afterwards, in September, he traveled to church meetings in several European countries. He pronounced blessings upon Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo while visiting each of those countries; these serve as addendums to Monson's 1985 dedication of Yugoslavia for the preaching of the gospel.

Nelson's only son, Russell M. Nelson Jr., served as an LDS missionary in Russia. In 2011, Nelson returned to Russia to organize the first church stake in that country, headquartered in Moscow.

Central Asia
In August 2003, Nelson became the first member of the Quorum of the Twelve to visit Kazakhstan. While there, Nelson visited government officials, was interviewed by Yuzhnaya Stalitsa television, and dedicated that country for the preaching of the gospel.

China
When he was Sunday School General President, Nelson attended a meeting where Kimball urged those present to learn Chinese. Nelson took up this challenge and developed elementary proficiency in Mandarin. He developed ties with the medical community in China and made several trips there to train surgeons. In 1985, Nelson was the first person ever made an honorary professor of Shandong Medical College. In 1995, Nelson went to Beijing, along with Neal A. Maxwell and other LDS Church leaders, on an official invitation of Li Lanqing, the Vice Premier of China.

President of the Church
With the death of Monson on January 2, 2018, Nelson became the anticipated successor to the church's presidency. After being ordained and set apart as church president on January 14, 2018, Nelson was introduced to church members and the media two days later, along with Oaks as his First Counselor and Henry B. Eyring as Second Counselor.

Worldwide Ministry
Nelson has been very active in his time as president of the LDS Church. In the short 17 months that he has served as president, he has traveled to all six inhabited continents and more than 8000 miles, speaking to hundreds of thousands church members in over thirty countries, including England, India, Australia, several island nations in Polynesia, almost every country in Latin America, Canada, Italy, and half a dozen occasions in the United States. These visits all over the world represent the increasing global reach of the LDS Church, as Nelson ministers to the world.

Later in April 2018, Nelson along with his wife, and Jeffrey R. Holland and his wife, went on a global ministry tour. They met with Latter-day Saints in London, England; Jerusalem; Nairobi, Kenya; Harare, Zimbabwe; Bengaluru, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Hong Kong; and Laie, Hawaii.

The next weekend Nelson traveled to Alberta, Canada where his second wife was born and raised, and gave three devotional addresses in three consecutive evenings.

In October 2018, Nelson concluded a 10-day trip to South America by dedicating the Concepcion Chile Temple. Following the December 2018 dedication of the Barranquilla Colombia Temple by Dallin H. Oaks, Nelson presided over the 3-day dedicatory services for the Rome Italy Temple from March 10–12, 2019. Nelson took all the church's apostles with him to Rome for that dedication. This was the first time all ordained apostles had been gathered in one location outside the United States. While in Rome, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles took the first apostolic group photo in two decades.

On February 10, 2019, Nelson spoke to church members in Arizona at State Farm Stadium in Glendale. In addition to the large crowd in attendance, the devotional was broadcast across the state.

In September 2018, Nelson visited the Dominican Republic, where he gave an entire talk in Spanish, which was believed to be the first time a church president had given an extended talk in a formal setting in a language other than English. On the same trip, he visited Puerto Rico.

On March 9, 2019, Nelson met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. The event marked the first time in history that a pope and an LDS Church president met face-to-face. The meeting took place the day before the church's Rome Italy Temple was dedicated.

Policy Changes and Announcements
The first few years of Nelson's leadership of the LDS Church saw many significant changes to church policy, although many had at least been heavily discuessed before he became church president, and some were continuations of policies instituted by his predecessors. Many of these changes have followed the theme of unification within the LDS Church and a desire to streamline worship for church members. Notable changes have included:

The first few months of Nelson's leadership of the LDS Church saw many significant changes to church policy, although many had at least been heavily discussed before he became church president, and some were continuations of policies instituted by his predecessors. Nelson began his presidency two days after his ordination with a short broadcast to church members in January 2018 before then holding a press conference. This broadcast ahead of the press conference was unprecedented and provided the new leaders an opportunity to briefly address the entire church immediately.

In March 2018, the First Presidency issued a letter on preventing and responding to abuse. This letter reiterated existing policies, but also explicitly stated that no one should ever be counseled against reporting abuse to legal authorities. The guidance also had a clear emphasis on using counseling to assist in healing from abuse. It also provided more clear policies mandating all interviews with women and youth be done with another person in the general area, and made it clear that youth and women could have a parent or other adult present for an interview. It also adjusted previous policies forbidding adult males to teach classes of children or youth alone to apply to all adults.

During the church's April 2018 general conference, Nelson announced the appointment of Asian-American Gerrit W. Gong and Brazilian Ulisses Soares to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, both of whom had been serving in the Presidency of the Seventy. By most measures, Gong was the first apostle who was not white, although some also consider Soares as non-white. These calls were recognized as adding diversity to the Quorum of the Twelve.

Nelson also announced major changes in church organization during the April general conference. First, the high priests groups at the ward level were dissolved, making all Melchizedek Priesthood holders in wards and branches part of the elders quorum. A stake's high priest quorum now consists of current members of stake presidencies, high councils, bishoprics and functioning patriarchs. Next, Nelson announced the end of home teaching and visiting teaching, replacing the programs with a focus on ministering, and shifting both the focus and methods of tracking them. As part of this change, young women ages 14–18 may be assigned as ministering sisters, similar to the-long standing policies of young men ages 14–18 serving as home teachers. At the end of the conference Nelson announced the construction of seven new temples, including the first in Nicaragua, Russia, India, and the US state of Virginia.

In May 2018, the church announced it would end its sponsorship of scouting troops at the end of 2019. As part of this decision, it was stated that all Young Men, Young Women, and Primary programs for those age 8-18 would be replaced by a new, unified worldwide program.

June 2018 began with a First Presidency-sponsored celebration of the 40th anniversary of the revelation extending priesthood and temple blessing to all worthy members without regard to race, in which Nelson gave concluding remarks. A few days before this, Nelson and his counselors met with the national leaders of the NAACP. That same weekend Nelson gave a devotional to LDS youth in which he urged them to more fully commit to the church. He encouraged them to choose a set of seven days together to avoid the use of social media.

On June 18, 2018, the First Presidency created committees assigned to form a unified hymnbook and children's songbook for the worldwide church membership, with each language edition having the same hymns (and songs) in the same order, and that these committees would be taking submissions and collecting surveys until July 2019. It is anticipated that the process of creating the new unified hymnbook and children's songbook will take several years.

In August 2018, Nelson issued a statement urging the use of the church's full name. At the church's General Conference in October 2018, he reiterated his position, declaring, "It is the command of the Lord." Nelson told members that the use of nicknames such as Mormon or LDS was "a major victory for Satan."

In the October 2018 general conference, Nelson announced an adjustment in the balance between a home-centered, church-supported form of worship. This was highlighted by shortening the length of Sunday church meetings to 2-hours from the previous 3-hours. At the end of the month, Nelson toured five south American countries, during which he met with Peru's president, Martin Vizcarra, gave a major address in Peru in Spanish, and dedicated the Concepción Chile Temple.

In December 2018, the church's First Presidency changed youth progression and priesthood ordination. Beginning in 2019, youth will move between classes and priesthood quorums at the beginning of the year in which they turn 12, 14, or 16, rather than when their birthday occurs during the year.

President of the Church
With the death of Monson on January 2, 2018, Nelson became the anticipated successor to the church's presidency. Nelson signed 1,150 mission calls as the presiding apostle. After being ordained and set apart as church president on January 14, 2018, Nelson was introduced to church members and the media two days later, along with Oaks as his First Counselor and Henry B. Eyring as Second Counselor. Nelson chose not to retain Dieter F. Uchtdorf, who had served as Monson's Second Counselor, in the new First Presidency. This marked the first time since 1985 that a new church president had not retained a previously-serving counselor.

Temples
Nelson's tenure has church president has been punctuated by an increased focus on worship on LDS temples. As of June 2019, President Nelson announced a total of 27 new temples to be built in countries all over the world. His travels have been punctuated by several dedications, most notably the Rome Italy Temple in March 2019, which was attended by all current members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Not long after Nelson became church president, the First Presidency announced the dedication dates for the Rome Italy Temple, which were later amended.

In 2018, Nelson announced 19 new temples, 7 in April and 12 in October, among which were the first in India, Nicaragua, Russia, and Cambodia. During his April 2018 visit to India, Nelson explained to church members that the Lord had instructed him to announce the temple the night before general conference, though he had not originally planned to do so. In announcing a temple in Nicaragua, Nelson fulfilled an apostolic promise he had made to church members there 6 years earlier.

In April 2019, Nelson announced 8 more temples, including the first for American Samoa.

In early May 2019, church leaders broke ground on 3 of the temples announced by Nelson in October 2018. This marked the first time since the late 1990s and early 2000s that ground was broken for temples less than a year following their announcement.

Marriages and children
While a student at the University of Utah, Nelson met and began dating fellow Utah student Dantzel White (1926–2005). They dated for three years, then were married on August 31, 1945, in the Salt Lake Temple. Together they had nine daughters—Marsha, Wendy (1951–2019), Gloria, Brenda, Sylvia, Emily (1958–1995), Laurie, Rosalie, and Marjorie—and one son – Russell Jr. (b. 1972).

Dantzel Nelson died unexpectedly at the Nelson home in Salt Lake City on February 12, 2005, at age 78. The following year, Nelson married the Canadian nurse and educator Wendy L. Watson (b. 1950) in the Salt Lake Temple. Watson, originally from Raymond, Alberta, was a professor of marriage and family therapy at BYU prior to her retirement in 2006. Her marriage to Nelson is her first.

Positions and awards

 * President of the Thoracic Surgical Directors Association
 * President of the Society for Vascular Surgery
 * President of the Utah State Medical Association
 * Director of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery
 * Chairman of the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery for the American Heart Association
 * Chairman of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at the LDS Hospital
 * Vice-chairman of the board of governors at the LDS Hospital
 * "Citation for International Service", American Heart Association
 * "Heart of Gold Award", American Heart Association
 * "Golden Plate Award", American Academy of Achievement
 * "Distinguished Alumni Award", University of Utah
 * "Surgical Alumnus of the Year Award", University of Minnesota Medical School
 * "Governor's Medal of Science: Lifetime Achievement Award", Utah Technology Innovation Summit

In June 2018 the University of Utah endowed a chair in cardiothoracic surgery named after Nelson and his first wife Dantzel.

Honorary degrees

 * Doctor of Science, Brigham Young University (1970)
 * Doctor of Medical Science, Utah State University (1989)
 * Doctor of Humane Letters, Snow College (1994)

Selected works

 * Books