All-Star Surgeon - Keith Black

Ebony, May, 1999 by Charles Whitaker

Brain tumor specialist Keith Black is blazing new trails in neurosurgery

MATTIE Williams sits demurely on the edge of a narrow examining table in an examining room that is only slightly less narrow. Her vision is blurred. Her speech, of late, has been halting, and getting around is becoming increasingly difficult. The tumor growing on her brain is wreaking havoc. Yet Williams appears surprisingly calm as she watches Dr. Keith Black, the neurosurgeon she has come to for hope, inspect diagnostic pictures of her brain posted on a wall-mounted light board.

As Black tells Williams about the path through which he will carefully enter her skull and carve away the tumor, his voice, a soft tenor, is quite reassuring. When he's done, he gives Williams' shoulder a gentle pat.

"We're going to get it," he says of the spreading mass on her brain.

"I know we are," Williams says. "You're the best. That's why we came to him," she says, referring to the tall, young doctor who will, quite literally, take her life into his hands.

Many people, in fact, say that 41-year-old Keith Black is the best. In the rarefied realm of neurosurgeons, he is the equivalent of Michael Jordan--an "artist" of such uncommon skill and agility that he elevates his team and leaves onlookers breathless. While the arena in which Black displays his immense talent is a small, sterile operating room, not a cavernous, fan-packed stadium, the precision of his moves, his steely determination and his surgical creativity, all put one in mind of His Airness. With one notable exception: There are lives, not basketball games, on the line when Keith Black performs.

The feats for which Black has gained international acclaim are his deft extractions of brain tumors; not just any brain tumors, but the most difficult ones--often malignant growths that are lodged in the base of the skull or in other seemingly inaccessible portions of the brain. Black, chief of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is one of the precious few neurosurgeons in the world who specialize in brain tumor removal. And he is, by most accounts, one of the most skillful practitioners of this highly difficult and dangerous procedure.

In addition, he is a gifted and visionary presence at the forefront of brain cancer research. As director of Cedars-Sinai's Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute, a collaborative effort that brings state-of-the art research to the day-to-day practice of medicine, he is helping to lead the charge against cancer on both the clinical and scientific fronts. He and his associates are doing clinical tests of a cancer vaccine that has proven effective in wiping out malignant tumors in laboratory rats. The development and testing of the vaccine is an example of the way in which Black hopes to shorten the distance between scientific discovery and medical practice.

"Scientists usually don't understand the clinical problems," he says, "and physicians don't usually understand the science. So you have this tremendous body of research that can be applied to treatments, but never gets applied. What we're trying to do is create this route that will more quickly translate the science in the laboratory into new clinical treatments."

Many say that no one is more eminently qualified to spearhead this effort than Keith Black, who is one of the 90 or so neurosurgeons in the United States of either African-American or African descent. He is a rare blend--a talented surgeon with the heart and soul of a dedicated researcher.

"It's very unusual to find someone who has his surgical skill and his passion for research," says Dr. Gary Dennis, president of the National Medical Association and chief of the Department of Neurosurgery at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. "But Keith Black is just one of those people with an amazing combination of intelligence, dedication and skill."

How large a presence is Keith Black in the world of modern medicine? Consider these statistics: Of the close to 5,000 neurosurgeons in the United States, he is one of the 50 or so who specialize in brain tumor removal, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Many of his patients trek halfway around the globe for the benefit of his surgical acuity. While the average brain tumor specialist may perform about 100 surgeries annually, Black, amazingly, does between 250 to 300 surgeries a year.

This is particularly astounding when one considers how exacting and exhausting brain tumor removal can be. It is not like strip mining, where you plunge in and tear out the offending mass. The brain is a difficult organ to operate on. Its viscous consistency--something like Jell-O--makes it a moving target. An errant cut into the "eloquent brain"--the tissue that controls thought, speech, movement and memory--could be disastrous, leaving a patient mute, paralyzed or worse.

"You're talking about working at the base of the skull, which requires a tremendous amount of excavation and construction," says Dennis. "This is surgery that takes a heck of a lot of endurance, patience and total concentration."