Levi Watkins, Jr., the first black graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, has conducted research on congestive heart failure and also performed the first implantation of the automatic defibrillator in February 1980 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The Automatic Implantation Defibrillator (AID) is designed to restore the heart's normal rhythm during an attack of ventricular fibrillation or arrhythmia, an irregularity of the heartbeat caused by coronary scar tissue or hardening of the coronary artery. When arrhythmia occurs, the heart is unable to pump blood and, unless corrected by devices such as the AID, the sufferer can die.

Watkins was born on June 13, 1945, in Parsons, Kansas, to Levi Watkins, Sr., an educator who became the president of Alabama State University, and Lillian Bernice Varnado. He graduated from Tennessee State University with honors in 1966. Watkins received his medical degree from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville in...