Medical Pioneer. He was the inventor of coronary angiography. Born in Noxapater, Mississippi, he graduated from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in 1940 and received his M.D. from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1943. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the United States Army Air Corps in the Pacific. While a resident at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, he learned the techniques of Cardiac Catheterization and his first appointment at the Cleveland Clinic was as director of the new Cardiac Laboratory. On the night of October 30, 1958, while working on a 26 year old patient with rheumatic heart disease, he was performing a procedure in which contrast dye was to be injected into the man's aortic valve. Just before the dye injection, he noticed that the catheter tip had inadvertently entered the man's right coronary artery. He asked that the catheter be withdrawn but before that could be accomplished a large amount of dye was injected directly into the artery. He expected the man's heart to go into fibrillation and prepared to do an emergency open chest massage. Instead of fibrillating, the man's heart stopped and Sones shouted at him to cough which successfully restarted the heart beating. From this experience, he realized that smaller amounts of contrast dye could safely be injected directly into coronary arteries, giving cardiologists accurate pictures of arterial blockages for the first time. In 1967 a Cleveland Clinic colleague, Dr. René Favaloro, performed the world's first coronary bypass surgery. Dr Favaloro called Sones, "The most important contributor to modern cardiology," and said that without his work, "all our efforts in myocardial revascularization would have been fruitless." He received numerous awards during his career, including the American Medical Association's 1978 Scientific Achievement Award and the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1969. In 1973 he was awarded the Texas Heart Institute's Ray C. Fish Award. He founded the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions and was its first president. He died of lung cancer.