James LeVoy Sorenson (1921 - 2008) was one of the most gifted inventors and business innovators of his time, having created scores of ingenious medical products that are now used everywhere in health care settings – such as the first disposable paper surgical mask, the first plastic venous catheter, the first blood-recycling system and the first computerized heart monitoring system. Each of his inventions made health care safer, more effective and more comfortable for patients, and solved persistent health care delivery problems.

However, long before he began creating and manufacturing innovative health care equipment, he had already built a multi-million dollar real estate portfolio by saving his money to purchase goat pasture near Salt Lake City at $25 per acre, now prime real estate occupied by prestigious neighborhoods. Becoming a successful real estate entrepreneur and one of America’s premier biomedical pioneers was an outcome few would have predicted for young Jim when he was growing up in a tarpaper shack in Yuba City, California. Born the oldest son of Joseph LeVoy and Emma Blaser Sorenson, in Rexburg, Idaho in 1921, the impoverished family soon moved to the Golden State, where his father found work as a ditch digger during the worst years of the Great Depression.

As a boy, Jim was slow of speech and dyslexic. Through determination and the support of his mother, Jim’s grades gradually improved in high school and he dreamed of becoming a physician. In 1940, he entered Placer Junior College to study pre-med, but a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and World War II disrupted his path to medical school. After 27 months in New England as a missionary, he enlisted in the U.S. Maritime Service, earned an officer’s commission and served a pharmacy internship.

After the war, Mr. Sorenson was hired by Upjohn to sell pharmaceuticals to physicians in Salt Lake City, Utah. While making pharmaceutical sales calls on doctors, Mr. Sorenson closely observed unmet needs and health care delivery problems physicians routinely encountered, and he frequently asked himself, “Isn’t there a better way to do that?” His simple, persistent question led to the invention and development of breakthrough health care devices that helped pioneer the modern medical device industry.

In 1957, Mr. Sorenson left Upjohn and co-founded Deseret Pharmaceutical to resell drugs to physicians. After noticing surgeons mistrustfully sort through and discard laundered reusable cloth surgical masks, Mr. Sorenson had the idea of a disposable surgical mask. In the years that followed, each of Mr. Sorenson’s medical innovations created new commercial opportunities around which businesses were built and medical devices mass-produced for the benefit of millions of patients. In 1960, Mr. Sorenson left Deseret Pharmaceutical and purchased a garment manufacturer he renamed LeVoy’s. This Salt Lake City company was innovative in a different way: it was one of the nation’s first successful direct marketing businesses, selling products through a network of women who sponsored home parties and went door-to-door.

In 1962, Mr. Sorenson founded Sorenson Research. His research department began with himself and two other bright men lacking serious formal education, but as they worked together the innovations kept coming. Some of the devices they created revolutionized critical health care practice.

Sorenson Research grew quickly but lacked capital in the late 1970s, a time of historically high interest rates on loans. He sold his undercapitalized company to Abbott in 1980 and became Abbott’s largest individual shareholder. Mr. Sorenson then founded a diverse family of enterprises linked by an innovative spirit and an entrepreneurial heritage. The Sorenson family of enterprises included real estate development, information technology, genetic research, environmental testing, pharmaceutical and philanthropic endeavors.

But material success is not an end in itself. “Wealth is an opportunity for further achievement,” Mr. Sorenson often said. One of the signature elements of Mr. Sorenson's legacy is the utilization of this wealth in diverse philanthropic endeavors through the Sorenson Legacy Foundation, including: numerous important health care facilities and programs; community centers; places of worship for a variety of religions; and educational efforts, including teacher education programs, fine arts programs for children in public schools, and curriculum and facilities for a leading deaf university.

Despite all of his accomplishments, Mr. Sorenson always maintained that his greatest legacy is the family that survives him: his wife, Beverley Taylor Sorenson; their two sons and six daughters; 47 grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren. "My family is my greatest treasure, and my greatest achievement and contribution in this life," he said.