During a busy year in global health, some of the most influential names driving innovation and shaping policy gathered Thursday night at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner.
The 2026 TIME100 Health list honors a diverse group of scientists, doctors, advocates, educators, and other changemakers leading the way in pioneering breakthrough treatments, improving access to care, and creating awareness around emerging issues in public health. The evening featured a panel on preventative care moderated by TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar and ended with a round of toasts from four honorees, who spoke about the importance of long-term funding for health, reinterpreting the story around aging, and altruism to help those in medical need.
Investing in health
The first toast of the night was given by Dr. Kiran Musunuru, director of the Genetic and Epigenetic Origins of Disease Program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He and Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas used a personalized CRISPR therapy to tweak a mutation that turned the devastating genetic disorder of an infant child named KJ into a manageable condition.
However, he noted that the monumental success of KJ’s treatment is the end result of decades of research that went into achievements like The Human Genome Project, rapid whole-genome sequencing, CRISPR gene editing, lipid nanoparticle formulations, RNA technology, representing the career work of many scientists behind the scenes.
“We’re simply one link in a very long chain … and, of course, no part of that long chain could have been forged without strong support from the federal government” and funding from the National Institutes of Health, he said. “Equally important were the career staff at the Food and Drug Administration, who worked closely with us to strike the right balance of rigor, flexibility, and speed in developing the therapy for KJ.”
As things are starting to get interesting in medicine and health, “now is not the time to take the foot off the accelerator,” he said.
An alternative narrative for aging
The second toast of the night was given by gerontologist Kerry Burnight who coined the term “joyspan” to shift the way people think about aging. “The tragedy of old age is not that we grow old and die. It’s that the process of doing so is made unnecessarily, and at times, excruciatingly painful and humiliating,” she said. While this narrative fuels the lucrative fear-based anti-aging industry, she invites us to visualize an alternative.
“If we, people lucky enough to be aging as well as serving aging humans, see and celebrate the strengths and contributions of older people, rather than fall prey to the fantasy of never dying, not aging,” she said, “we can tackle these daunting challenges that our nation is facing.”
Shrinking the kidney transplant waiting list
Actor and director Jesse Eisenberg, who made a non-directed kidney donation to an anonymous matching patient next on the transplant list last year, closed out dinner with a final toast advocating for spreading the word on altruistic organ donations that could help the more than 90,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant. “I want to acknowledge that I am probably the dumbest person here and the least qualified to be talking right now,” he said, but he focused on what he did have experience in, which was the “risk-free” process behind his organ donation, which he knew he had to do after hearing about the concept of this type of donation on a podcast.
“I never heard from anyone or read an interview with anybody who said they wrestled with the decision. … It was always: ‘I heard about it and signed up,’” he said. “Which makes me wonder if the problem isn’t convincing people to do this, but simply finding the people who already would.”
“That’s the reason I wanted to speak tonight — and to briefly co-opt this gathering of otherwise brilliant minds — because I imagine there is no more qualified group of people who could figure out how to reach these particular people, how to shrink that horrible number of 90,000 people to close to zero.”
TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was presented by Novartis and Aster DM Healthcare.
At the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner in New York City on Thursday, TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar kicked off a panel discussion with one big question: Why is heart disease still the leading cause of death for men and women?
“Perhaps before we answer the question of why it’s the leading cause of death today,” replied Dr. Sadiya Khan, a professor of cardiovascular epidemiology and an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, “we have to know where we started.”
She began by telling a story: In 1945, when then-President Franklin Roosevelt died, his death seemed “sudden and unexpected,” Khan said. But looking back at the notes from his doctors, Khan said, it’s clear that he had had very high blood pressure for years that was untreated.
“None of us would sit on that today,” Khan said. “We now know we can treat blood pressure. We can add years, decades of life by treating blood pressure. But we still don’t do it. And we still don’t achieve that success.”
Millions of people in the U.S. have high blood pressure, but many of them don’t receive adequate treatment, Khan said. “So I think the answer is: we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”
Khan, who was on the 2026 TIME100 Health list for her work on assessing cardiovascular risk early, was joined onstage Thursday by Arianna Huffington, the founder and chief executive officer of health and wellness company Thrive Global, and Victor Bultó, president of Novartis U.S., which sponsored the event in New York City.
Kumar turned the discussion over to Bultó, asking him why Novartis has not only developed therapies to tackle heart disease but has shifted towards addressing human behavior. Bultó, who was also on the 2026 TIME100 Health list, said that the technology that can reduce cardiovascular risk events and add years to many people’s lives already exists—but isn’t being utilized.
“We had to shift from being just a medical sciences company to start shifting into being a social sciences company to understand what is the underlying behavior that actually underpins this,” he said.
Bultó said that his team has learned that humans tend to be “wired to take the dopamine hit of something that gives us pleasure today and discount all the damage it’s going to do in the future.” Now, experts are advocating for greater understanding on how people can change those behaviors.
Khan also talked about her efforts in targeting young women to help them avoid cardiovascular issues later in life. She said that for many young women, healthcare is often focused around pregnancy. And many women experience complications during pregnancy, such as high blood pressure, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes. She herself had gestational diabetes, and she hadn’t realized that it has a connection to heart disease.
“We’re learning so much more that these early markers can actually be signals and be a red flag about the future. And the important thing is not that that’s scary or that means that I’m going to have a heart attack, but that I can do something about it now,” Khan said. “I can focus on the health behaviors that are going to prevent this from progressing and really make a difference. And with that information, we can empower people—young women, young men—to really be able to take hold of their own health much earlier than we used to think about it.”
“I mean, even today, if you Google heart attack or heart disease, you get a picture of an older person, and that’s not where we should be,” she continued. “We have to start much earlier.”
Huffington called it “inspiring” that both Khan, a prominent doctor, and Bultó, the head of a big pharma company, were willing to talk about the impact that both medicines and behaviors can have on human health.
She said that there are five critical behaviors to consider when it comes to health: sleep, stress, food, exercise, and connection.
“It’s a whole new playbook for pharma that used to basically sell you a drug, have a purely transactional relationship with you, and now is changing that to actually be your partner on your health journey, which obviously includes medicines, but it also includes behavior,” Huffington said.
TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was presented by Novartis and Aster DM Healthcare.
Three panelists engaged in a spirited discussion about longevity and disease prevention at a TIME100 Talks event moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park in New York City on Wednesday.
Dr. Raj Panjabi, senior partner of the bioplatform innovation company Flagship Pioneering, leading its Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative; Jillian Michaels, creator of The Fitness App and host of the podcast Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels; and Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, joined Park on stage to discuss topics ranging from vaccines to weight-loss drugs.
During the conversation, Park asked Panjabi, who previously served as White House Senior Director for global health security and biodefense during the Joe Biden Administration, about growing mistrust in vaccines in the U.S. Panjabi emphasized that it’s important to approach any claim made about vaccines “with curiosity” and “help folks understand the science.”
He said, for instance, that scientists learned that the COVID vaccine was more effective at preventing hospitalizations than it was at preventing infection. In the first two years after the COVID vaccine was distributed in the U.S., more than 18 million hospitalizations and more than 3 million deaths were prevented, according to a 2022 report from The Commonwealth Fund.
“The takeaway that I have, from the work of vaccinations, is that it is still a proven, effective intervention. It’s worth studying them, continuing to study them, but then it’s worth actually looking at the data,” Panjabi said.
Park went on to ask Michaels what questions she has about the safety of vaccines, in light of a post on X in September in which she said, “If we can recognize the undeniable success of vaccines historically, why is it treated as dangerous or taboo to raise legitimate questions about how we use them today?”
Michaels has sparked controversy in the past for expressing support for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, led by prominent vaccine skeptic and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A New York Times story published over the summer described Michaels as “concerned vaccines haven’t been studied vigorously enough (though she does not consider herself broadly anti-vax).”
Michaels replied that her questions weren’t necessarily about safety but about some aspects of the vaccine schedule. She criticized the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, which protects against a highly infectious disease that can damage the liver, is given at birth.
Critics, like Michaels, have questioned why a newborn should be vaccinated against a virus that can be transmitted through unprotected sex or shared needles. “Parents want to know these things,” she said. (Public health experts have emphasized that the sooner the vaccine is administered, the greater the chances of preventing early childhood exposures, including mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B.)
Panjabi said that a key part of recommending any medical intervention—whether that be vaccines or drugs—is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. He urged people to have respect for one another when engaging in those discussions.
Park turned the conversation to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, asking Barzilai if they are a good thing, to which he replied “definitely yes.” He said that “obesity accelerates aging,” so treating that can address that issue. And he cited new research that suggests that GLP-1 weight-loss drugs may have other positive health effects, such as reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The topic sparked a question from an audience member. Andrea Deierlein, director of Public Health Nutrition and associate professor at the New York University School of Global Public Health, expressed concerns that the drugs could be used to replace other aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Barzilai replied that exercise, diet, sleep, and social connectivity are “good for everyone,” but as people age, it becomes harder to “optimize” those aspects of a healthy lifestyle.
“What we determined is that there are drugs that could, when you’re old, change the rate of your aging,” Barzilai said. But, he said, in a conclusion that spoke to the state of play across the topic: “How we’re going to do it and to whom is still a discussion.”
TIME100 Talks: Living Better, Longer—Reimagining Healthcare from Sickcare to Wellcare was presented by Shaklee.
Health leaders gathered for the inaugural TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Oct. 22 for an evening of discussion about the most pressing issues in health care.
Experts appeared on a series of four panel discussions, addressing issues like equitable access to health care, women’s health, the impact of emerging technologies, and health policy changes.
The evening began with a performance of an original poem by writer, playwright, organizer, and educator Mahogany Browne, followed by a panel featuring Dr. Uché Blackstock, author and founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity; Adrelia Allen, executive director of clinical trial patient diversity at Merck; and Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and executive director of Caring Across Generations.
The panelists discussed the need to create health care frameworks that are inclusive of the most vulnerable populations. “There’s some basic policies in the country that we need to make in our ability to take care of ourselves and the people we love,” Poo said. “And if we do that, I think you can be transformative in overall health outcomes.”
The second panel,moderated by TIME correspondent Eliana Dockterman, focused on global health inequities for women, and featured Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund; Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health; and Dr. Asif Dhar, vice chair and U.S. Life Sciences and Health Care Industry Leader for Deloitte Global Consulting Services. Panelists discussed how many women have shared experiences of feeling dismissed or ignored by medical providers, leading to a lack of trust in the healthcare industry.
Mofokeng also spoke about a brief she had filed in a U.S. court ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which she argued that restricting abortion rights would go against international human rights treaties. She emphasized that abortion is a decision that should remain between a medical provider and patient and that restricting it sets a “dangerous” precedent.
“Once you take away one right, it’s most likely even easier to take away many other rights, and that’s why we have to see the right to health as the master key to unlock many other rights,” Mofokeng said. “When we protect the right to health, we are also protecting multiple other human rights as well.”
In a panel about the impact of emerging technologies in health care, Shyamal Patel, senior vice president and head of science of ŌURA, and Dr. David Agus, founding director and co-CEO of the Ellison Institute of Technology, spoke about the opportunities and obstacles involved in ensuring that wearable technologies, like smartwatches and fitness trackers, can be adopted by the healthcare industry.
“One aspect is this evolution of the technology and what we can do with it and how many aspects of our health we can understand better because we have access to this personal health technology,” said Patel. “And the second aspect is, how do we make sense of it and bring it into the practice of health care?”
Between the panels, TIME CEO Sam Jacobs had a brief conversation with TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year Heman Bekele, a 15-year old skin cancer researcher. Bekele spoke of the importance of involving kids in health and science from a young age. “I think the best way to do it is to … give exposure to people who might not have been exposed to STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and STEAM [STEM + the arts] from a really young age,” he said.
The evening closed with a panel on strategies for health policy changes. Dr. Raj Panjabi, senior partner at Flagship Pioneering and former White House senior director and special assistant to President Joe Biden; Lori M. Reilly, chief operating officer at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; and Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and chief of the Research and Education Service at the VA St. Louis Healthcare System; talked about how the 2024 U.S. election and COVID-19 pandemic have made health care a more central part of the conversation today.
“Looking ahead, I imagine health care is only going to become an even more important agenda item for Presidents in either party,” Panjabi said.
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA, and PhRMA.
Three healthcare experts spoke about efforts to improve patient access and the future of the industry at a panel, moderated by TIME editor in chief Sam Jacobs, at the inaugural TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Tuesday night.
Jacobs kicked off the discussion by asking Dr. Raj Panjabi, senior partner at Flagship Pioneering and former White House senior director and special assistant to President Joe Biden, to share any positive lessons we can learn from the 2024 election cycle, with just two weeks to go until Election Day.
“It’s not always that every White House or every presidential cycle prioritizes health care—sometimes it’s hard to get on the agenda. But it’s so clear that in this election that both parties are paying attention to people’s health care,” Panjabi said, acknowledging that the candidates, Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, have taken very different stances on healthcare issues. “Having health care being front … and center into the presidential election, I think, is a positive thing because it also highlights the pain and the challenges people are facing when it comes to lowering health care costs.”
In the same vein, Jacobs went on to ask Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and chief of the Research and Education Service at the VA St. Louis Healthcare System, if there is anything positive we can take away from the COVID-19 pandemic. Al-Aly, who has studied the short- and long-term effects of COVID-19, said that we learned a lot from the pandemic, such as how viruses can affect people and lead to long-term illnesses.
“I think the silver lining there is learning from the past, learning from the prior experiences, and making sure that we leverage those experiences and that knowledge to help us improve our response in future pandemics,” Al-Aly said.
Al-Aly applauded how scientists were able to develop vaccines against COVID-19 quickly. “It’s really showcased that when we put our mind to it as a nation, we really devote energy and resources to accomplishing one goal,” he said. “I think that’s really a brilliant example of how policymakers could work with scientists to really save the day.”
Lori M. Reilly, chief operating officer at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a sponsor of the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum, added that she was concerned that misinformation is leading some people to not vaccinate their children.
She said she worried about the lack of trust in the healthcare industry, particularly in Big Pharma. She shared how she visited her daughter in college over the weekend and another parent there accused the industry of not being interested in curing diseases.
“I feel like any big institution—be it Big Media, Big Insur[ance], Big Pharma—faces a crisis of trust, and we’re seeing that, unfortunately, play out,” Reilly said. “I’m worried that that narrative, or these beliefs—that as an industry, we’re not interested in [curing diseases]—take hold and take root with people.” Reilly pointed to how her industry has done important work on curative or preventative medicines, such as a cervical cancer vaccine.
The panelists also spoke about several other issues the healthcare industry is facing. Reilly expressed concern about the high cost of medication and health insurance deductibles.
“For many patients, that price causes them to walk away from the pharmacy counter because they cannot access and afford it,” Reilly said. “Medicines do no good if they’re sitting on someone’s shelf.”
When discussing solutions to the high cost of American health care, Panjabi said there’s “not a silver bullet,” citing the need for policy reforms. He also pointed to the power that technology and scientific innovation can have in addressing many of the issues in the health care sector. He applauded Heman Bekele, TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year, who Jacobs had spoken to during Tuesday night’s event just moments before Panjabi, Al-Aly, and Reilly took the stage.
“Shout out to him, because I went to [Johns Hopkins] … and it took me about 10 more years before I could ever say the things he even said as a 15-year-old,” Panjabi said, prompting laughs from the crowd.
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA, and PhRMA.
From smartwatches to fitness trackers, wearable technologies have the opportunity to transform how patients understand their health—long after they leave their doctor’s office. But adoption of the technology, for both patients and healthcare professionals, has been slow going.
Shyamal Patel and Dr. David Agus gathered at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Oct. 22 to discuss the state of emerging technologies in healthcare and the impact they stand to have in a panel moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park.
Wearable technology could help patients monitor their sleep patterns, blood pressure, or menstrual cycle, but it’s yet to be widely adopted by the healthcare sector, says Agus, founding director and co-CEO of the Ellison Institute of Technology. “It still has not been normalized.”
In part, it’s because many healthcare providers are not yet trained in how to analyze the data. “We just haven’t built the muscle on the healthcare side to truly think about how we ingest this data and make sense of it,” says Patel, senior vice president and head of science at ŌURA, a sponsor of the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum. “If you had continuous health blood pressure data, how do you know, what do you do with it? Our practice of healthcare is built around one blood pressure measurement in your clinic.”
There also isn’t enough communication between the healthcare technology industry and healthcare providers, says Patel. “In the U.S., you have this fairly complex ecosystem of payers, providers, [and] patients. Now you can add health technology companies to that mix,” he says. “The interests of all of these players are not necessarily always aligned. So I think there is a real need for strong partnerships between these stakeholders to focus on driving better health outcomes.”
Agus points to several obstacles standing in the way of widespread adoption of wearable tech.The price point of consumer-focused wearable technology can often be inaccessible, and many products don’t have a CMS billing code for insurance reimbursement. Many healthcare professionals also still want to see studies that prove that the data from wearable tech is accurate and can encourage a change in a patient’s behavior.
“Interventions that can affect outcome are what we need, and we need companies to put the capital up front and do the studies to show they can affect outcome,” says Agus. “And once we do that, those are the technologies that we should all push and enable our patients to use, and they have to be accessible.”
It’s been a little over a decade since consumer-focused wearable technologies like fitness trackers and smart rings first became mainstream, but the industry has plenty of room to grow. “One aspect is this evolution of the technology and what we can do with it and how many aspects of our health we can understand better because we have access to this personal health technology,” says Patel. “And the second aspect is, how do we make sense of it and bring it into the practice of health care?”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA, and PhRMA.
At the first-ever TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Tuesday night, TIME correspondent Eliana Dockterman began a panel conversation about women’s health by mentioning that one of the speakers—Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund—gave her a bracelet backstage.
“This bracelet has 28 beads, and five of them are red, representing the days that a girl might miss school. Why? Because of period poverty,” Kanem said. “So we wear it to remind each other that there’s things that we could do to help her out, make sure she finishes her education.”
“I thought that that was a very apt symbol for what we are going to talk about today,” Dockterman said.
Kanem was joined on stage by Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health, and Dr. Asif Dhar, vice chair and U.S. Life Sciences and Health Care Industry Leader for Deloitte Global Consulting Services. (Deloitte is a sponsor of the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum). Mofokeng spoke about how she worked to make young women feel welcome in healthcare spaces, after noticing that some were not coming into clinics in South Africa. She said she tried to make consultation settings more relaxed, even using pop culture references to make her patients feel comfortable. She emphasized the need to approach sexual health and gender identity with patients in a “non-stigmatizing way.”
“We take for granted that the actual physical architecture of a clinic is conducive, and often that’s what turns young people away,” Mofokeng said. “It got me thinking very intentionally about the spaces we are creating within the health system for people to access care—that even that in its design has to change to be conducive for establishing therapeutic conversations about services.”
The panelists focused on how many women have shared that they distrust the healthcare system. Dockterman pointed to a recent Deloitte report, which cited a 2019 survey that found that one in five women said they felt that a medical provider had either ignored or dismissed their healthcare concerns. Dhar added that heart attacks are misdiagnosed in women more often than they are in men.
“Trust is built on experience, and if a person has a negative experience, it takes quite a while to rebuild that type of trust,” Dhar said. He referenced how actress and healthcare advocate Halle Berry described at a TIME100 event in May that her doctor initially thought she had herpes, when in reality, she was experiencing perimenopause and vaginal atrophy. “You could imagine the profound erosion of trust,” Dhar said.
The solution, he said, is to teach people in the healthcare space “to be able to have great capacity to listen.” He said technology can also be used to help address this problem, but that it must be “engineered with health equity in mind.”
“It’s just as important that those teams are infused with health equity officers, with the voice of the patient and the voice of women,” Dhar said.
Dockterman raised another example of the medical industry dismissing women’s pain that was described on the podcast “The Retrievals,” which shared the true story of how women complained of pain during their egg-retrieval surgeries but were ignored by the clinic. Later, it was revealed that a nurse had been stealing fentanyl and that the women had been enduring the procedure without painkillers.
Kanem said that many systems are male-dominated but that we’re now in a moment in time “where it is within our power to make certain changes” to combat this issue. She stressed the importance of listening to patients and taking their concerns seriously.
“Part of human rights is understanding your own value and your own worth, and it starts with a girl. So I think the expectation that we should listen to girl children, make sure that they’re educated and they’re not hiding when they have their periods and on and on, up until we build a better health system where, of course it’s automatic that we listen to everyone,” Kanem said.
Dockterman also asked Mofokeng about a brief she had filed in a U.S. court in the lead-up to the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the brief, Mofokeng argued that restricting abortion rights would violate international human rights treaties that the U.S. had ratified.
“The right to have autonomy and make decisions on your health care is a right, especially in the context of abortion, that should be discussed between physician or caregiver and the woman—there should be no other interference,” Mofokeng said.
She went on to say that the federal government doesn’t interfere in other medical procedures, like a knee or heart transplant. “Doctors are trusted and patients are trusted to make the right decisions, and so the use of criminal legal frameworks in this instance of abortion further stigmatizes, discriminates, and pushes people further to the margins,” Mofokeng said.
Mofokeng added that when people start taking away one right, it often makes it easier to take away others—for instance, access to contraception.
According to a 2017 study by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, about 25 million unsafe abortions occurred globally each year between 2010 and 2014.
“When we see maternal mortality, we know that women’s health is global health,” Kanem said. “All of this can be avoided if we have a caring healthcare system.”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA, and PhRMA.
Dr. Uché Blackstock, Adrelia Allen, and Ai-jen Poo gathered at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Oct. 22 to discuss the need to create equitable access to health care during a panel moderated by TIME health correspondent Jamie Ducharme.
There’s an overarching lack of support in the U.S. when it comes to making sure everyone has equal access to health care—especially when it comes to supporting caregivers, says Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and executive director of Caring Across Generations. “Our country was never fully … invested in caregiving, the non-medicalized care that we need to live well,” she said.
It’s an oversight that has meant that many people fall through the gaps. Blackstock, an author and the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, cited a recent study from the Commonwealth Fund that found that the U.S. continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation—with two-thirds of deaths occuring during the postpartum period.
“That caregiving in the postpartum period for people who give birth is just absent in our country,” Blackstock said. “People need the most support … with small babies. You need a village, but you also need a system that’s going to make sure that you are not only psychologically OK, but you’re physically OK.”
When it comes to clinical trials, Allen, executive director of clinical trial patient diversity at Merck, a sponsor of the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum, said that there is work to be done to ensure that all clinical trials are accessible to all communities—whether that be by enrolling more diverse populations or training researchers in cultural competency. She stressed the importance of shifting perspectives from “equal to equity” to ensure meaningful steps are taken to be inclusive of all communities. Allen says that a new FDA requirement, which requires pharmaceutical companies to create Diversity Action Plans to support some clinical trials, means that we “are on the cusp” of seeing clinical trials become more accessible.
Poo noted that governmental action is essential to making sure everyone, everywhere has access to the health care they deserve. “There’s some basic policies in the country that we need to make in our ability to take care of ourselves and the people we love,” she said. “And if we do that, I think you can be transformative in overall health outcomes.”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA, and PhRMA.
As cities around the world grapple with congestion and seek to lower emissions, one New Zealand-based startup is looking upward for solutions. Next year, Whoosh will begin construction on a gondola-like ride-hailing network in a 370-acre area of tourism hot spot Queenstown—the first of its kind.
Whoosh resembles a ski lift, descending for passenger pickup, but operates differently. While gondolas transport lifts by moving the entire cableway, each Whoosh cabin uses an electric motor to propel itself along a stationary network of cables and rails at an average speed of about 26 m.p.h.
Powering the cabins themselves means the guideway can be “really simple, low-cost infrastructure,” Whoosh CEO Chris Allington says. The pods have a mechanism that allows them to switch from cables to suspended rails at speed, meaning that, unlike a gondola, Whoosh can take flexible routes from pickup to drop-off without stopping.
Whoosh says its vehicles, expected to be up and running as part of the pilot scheme by 2027, could help reduce travel times and are twice as efficient as the most economical electric cars. Users will be able to hail rides on demand using an app or ticket-vending machines.
Queenstown is the ideal testing ground “because it’s got horrendous traffic,” but it’s at a manageable scale, Allington says. If the network were expanded across the city, it would have the capacity to take about “20% of vehicles off the road,” he says.
Each cabin will be complete with a stabilization system that smooths rides in windy conditions, and smart-glass windows can frost over to stop riders from peering into homes as they glide past, Allington says. While providers will ultimately set the cost for riders, Allington says that he expects it to be more expensive than mass transit but cheaper than an Uber.
Allington says the cabins are more energy efficient than other vehicles because, by using a dedicated guideway, they avoid energy–wasting actions like braking or idling in traffic. Whoosh says it uses roughly one-sixth the energy of a U.S. bus or rail system. A one-hour ride uses “about the same amount of energy as having a 10-minute shower,” Allington says. And the infrastructure the pods glide across has roughly a fifth of the embodied carbon—the total emissions associated with materials and construction—of ground-level rail networks, Whoosh says.
Of course, the scheme remains untested, and many a futuristic transport idea has fizzled in implementation. But the company already has its sights set on the U.S. Five North Texas cities—Dallas, Plano, Arlington, Frisco, and DeSoto—are being considered for potential sites of Whoosh’s first U.S. installation, says its U.S. partner and Google spin-off, Swyft Cities, which is in talks with public- and private-sector customers. “It’s places that are fast-growing, typically were built around the auto, and now, they realize they’re stuck,” says Swyft Cities CEO Jeral Poskey. Part of what makes Whoosh a compelling option, he says, is that it can be “retrofitted into cities,” with its modular infrastructure, allowing it to start small and grow over time.
“Turns out, none of the high-tech innovations that fly or drive themselves or go through tunnels are really designed to solve the problem that most of the world is facing,” Poskey says. Subways cater to high-density centers, while cars, including autonomous vehicles, suit low-density urban sprawl. Whoosh, which targets trips of 1 to 5 miles, offers a solution for those in the middle ground, he says. “We find that people want to live in medium-density areas,” Poskey says, but “they just aren’t well supported by either automobiles or mass transit.”
Tourists consider Dublin to be a lively, legendary cultural hub. But for its residents and business owners, getting anywhere can be a challenge. “Traffic in Dublin is absolutely appalling,” says Emma Gray, the co-founder of Gaillot et Gray, a cafe in one of the city’s busiest areas.
Multiple studies rate Dublin’s traffic as the second-worst among major global cities, behind only London, whose population is nearly 20 times greater. Ireland’s Department of Transport estimates that the economic cost of traffic jams in Dublin is likely to soar from 336 million euros ($372 million) in 2022 to 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) by 2040.
In February, the city announced a plan that aims for a 40% reduction in overall traffic by 2028. In August, Dublin launched two primary traffic lanes to the city center, set up dedicated bus lanes, and established pedestrian-only streets and gathering spots in an effort to encourage more people to get around the city without using cars.
Dublin joined a flock of global cities that have banned or limited vehicle traffic on a regular basis. Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Birmingham, England, Brussels, Helsinki, and Copenhagen are among a growing list of places that are addressing congestion and encouraging motorists to walk, bike and use transit.
A key goal is to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions that pose a danger to people and the environment. Hundreds of cities and countries have joined a U.N.-led drive to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In March, the Biden administration announced new automobile emissions standards pushing automakers to sell more electric and hybrid plug-in vehicles in the U.S. by 2032.
According to the U.N., urban areas consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has said that cities were “where the climate battle will largely be won or lost.”
Paris-, the site of a landmark conference in 2015 focused on the environment, says it has been making progress for years. In 2007, it adopted the Plan Climat, which in 11 years reduced its carbon footprint by 20%, and cut greenhouse gases by 25%. By 2050, the city aims to achieve zero emissions within its borders, and shrink its total carbon footprint by 80%.
Some of its steps include solar panels, and most noticeable by visitors, bike lanes across the city. Since 2001, bike thoroughfares have grown from 125 miles to more than 600 miles. At times, bikes outnumber motor vehicles and there are even bike jams at some busy intersections. For the Olympics, Paris added 34 miles of new routes in just over two years.
In Amsterdam, where even the royal family uses bicycles, carbon emissions levels have dropped by 30% since 2010, according to Rory van den Bergh, a spokesman for the city. Pollution levels are almost back to 1990 figures, and the city hopes to eliminate 95% of emissions by 2050.
Meanwhile, Copenhagen is aiming to become the world’s first carbon neutral city by next year, based on a four-part plan that includes energy consumption and production, mobility measures and administrative steps. It reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% between 2019 and 2022, by focusing on the city’s heating and cooling network, which uses residual waste incineration to heat houses across the city. The climate plan aims for at least 75% of all trips to be by foot, bike or public transport in 2025.
But business owners say environmental moves can constrict their ability to operate. In Dublin, Gray already sees an issue with the city’s plan to set up the riverside corridors, one of which is near her cafe. Currently, it does not provide for loading zones, something she pointed out in a response to the upcoming regulations.
“Without a place for our deliveries to stop this could be a major problem for us,” she says. For instance, a nearby family business that specializes in glazing and glass cutting won’t be able to function without regular deliveries of plate glass. “The fear is that without consideration to local business, we will all just move out of the city,” Gray says.
That’s a crucial consideration: small and medium sized businesses account for more than 90% of businesses worldwide and employ more than 50% of workers. In emerging economies, they provide up to 40% of GDP, according to the World Bank.
Still, there’s a sense that, despite the obstacles, change is inevitable. “More bikes and spaces for cyclists, and more green space and less cars are the way forward,” Gray says.
Heman Bekele whipped up the most dangerous of what he called his “potions” when he was just over 7 years old. He’d been conducting his own science experiments for about three years by that point, mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.
“They were just dish soap, laundry detergent, and common household chemicals,” he says today of the ingredients he’d use. “I would hide them under my bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of mixing together completely at random.”
But soon, things got less random. For Christmas before his 7th birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been looking up chemical reactions online and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together produce prodigious amounts of heat. That got him thinking that perhaps he could do the world some good. “I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents kept a closer eye on him. As it turned out, having adults watching what he does is something that Heman, now 15, would have to get used to. These days, a whole lot of people are paying him a whole lot of attention. Last October, the 3M company and Discovery Education selected Heman, a rising 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition. When school is in session, he’ll be there less often, but will continue to plug away. “I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”
It’s that ambition—to say nothing of that selflessness—that has earned Heman recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024.
Born in Addis Ababa before emigrating to the U.S. with his family when he was 4, Heman recalls that some of his earliest memories were of seeing laborers working in the blistering sun, usually with no protection for their skin. His parents taught him and his sisters—Hasset, now 16, and Liya, now 7—to cover up, and explained the dangers of too much time outdoors without sunscreen or proper clothing.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it, but when I came to America, I realized what a big problem the sun and ultraviolet radiation is when you’re exposed to it for a long time,” Heman says.
It didn’t take too long for him to start thinking about how he might help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight one form of skin cancer and has shown promise against several more. Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and usually comes in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a front-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made available more easily to people in the earliest stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he reckoned, might be just the delivery system for such a lifesaving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be a lot more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs for skin-cancer treatment.
Photograph by Dina Litovsky for TIME
“What is one thing that is an internationally impactful idea, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Heman recalls thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water for cleaning. So soap would probably be the best option.”
There was a long way to go between inspiration and application, however. Executing on his idea was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into an ordinary bar of soap, since any therapeutic power the imiquimod might confer would just be washed down the drain with the suds. The answer was to combine the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would linger on the skin when the soap was washed away—much the way moisturizer or fragrance can stay behind after the suds are rinsed off.
There was only so much brainstorming Heman could do on his own, however. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M challenge and submitted a video explaining his idea. Soon, he received an invite to the company’s HQ in St. Paul, Minn., to deliver a pitch in front of a panel of judges. Before that day was out, he’d been named the winner. The $25,000 prize, he knew, would go a long way toward helping him afford to pursue his research, but he’d still need a professional lab in which to conduct the work. That opportunity arrived in February, when he attended a networking event hosted by the Melanoma Research Alliance, in Washington, D.C. There, he met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
“I remember reading somewhere something about this young kid who had an idea for a skin-cancer soap,” says Rebecca. “It immediately piqued my interest, because I thought, how cool, him wanting to make it accessible to the whole world. And then, by complete serendipity at this Melanoma Research Alliance meeting, the CEO of the alliance introduced me to Heman. From the first conversation, his passion was evident. When I found out he lived very nearby in Virginia, I told him if he ever wanted to stop by the lab he’d be more than welcome.”
Heman took him up on that idea, and Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman, acting as his principal investigator and inviting him to work at the Baltimore lab, toggling between benchwork and schoolwork back in Fairfax.
Heman Bekele photographed at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore on July 11Dina Litovsky for TIME
For close to half a year now, Heman and Rebecca have been running basic research on mice, injecting the animals with strains of skin cancer and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-infused soap and see what the results are. And though they’re getting ready to test it and a control against melanoma, Heman knows “there’s still a long way to go”—not just testing the soap, but also patenting it and getting FDA certification, which can take a decade altogether.
It is a measure of Heman’s enormous head start that when that decade passes, he will still be only 25 years old—the age at which medical students have not even completed their postgrad education. He’s making good use of that time. In addition to working on his idea, he’s promoting it. In June, he delivered a presentation before 8,000 people at Boston’s Tsongas Center, during a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists. “That was nerve-racking,” he says, “but it was fun.”
Heman has fun in more conventional ways too. He’s part of the Woodson High School marching band, on both flute and trombone. He plays basketball, reads voraciously (especially fantasy, though he recently reread The Great Gatsby, which he describes as “a pretty good read”), and considers chess “a turn-my-brain-off-and-play kind of thing.”
He credits his family, particularly his parents, for setting the stage for his achievements. His mother Muluemebet is a teacher; his father Wondwossen is a human-resources specialist for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The example of their sacrifice, coming to an unfamiliar country in service of their children’s education, has imbued him with a love of learning and a commitment to pursuing the improbable—or even the seemingly impossible. Nor are his parents and Rebecca the only adults stewarding him on his long scientific journey. He is also aided by Deborah Isabelle, his mentor from 3M.
“I got really lucky,” says Isabelle. “Last year was my first year participating as a mentor in the Young Scientist Challenge, and I was paired with Heman. He’s an incredible, passionate, very inspiring young man.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make mistakes—and Isabelle, for one, has been there to catch him when he falls.
“At one point when he was making the soap, things didn’t work the way he expected,” she says. “So I asked him, What didn’t work? What did you do? And we talked about it, and he’s like, ‘Wow, I didn’t exactly follow the directions.’ And so we had a conversation about that, and he was able to go up and figure out some things, and say, ‘OK, this is what I learned from that.’”
That kind of trial and error will, Heman hopes, take him to the day that his health-giving soap can at last be used in early-stage cancers—including so-called cancer Stage 0, when there is just a small growth that has not yet had much effect on the surface of the skin—and then in later stages, when it would be an adjunct to other treatments.
For all of this, Heman remains humble about what he’s accomplished in just 15 years. “Anybody could do what I did,” he says. “I just came up with an idea. I worked towards that idea, and I was able to bring it to life.” But he confesses that he worries too: scientific breakthroughs seem to be coming faster and faster—in medicine, in engineering, in artificial intelligence—and he frets that people may have reached something of a saturation point.
“A lot of people have this mindset that everything’s been done, there’s nothing left for me to do,” he says. “To anybody having that thought, [I’d say] we’ll never run out of ideas in this world. Just keep inventing. Keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and keep making it a better place.”
British swimmer Adam Peaty was the first athlete to reveal he had COVID-19 at the Paris Olympics, a day after winning silver in the men’s 100-m breaststroke at La Defense Arena.
In a statement, Team GB said Peaty had started feeling sick, with throat symptoms, before his race on July 28, that his symptoms got worse afterward, and he then tested positive for COVID-19.
Since then, nearly a dozen swimmers, including several members of the Australian women’s water-polo team, have tested positive, raising questions about how widely the virus is spreading, especially in the pool.
A spokesperson for Paris 2024 said in an emailed statement to TIME that the organization is encouraging athletes to practice good infection-control behaviors such as “wearing a mask in the presence of others, limiting contacts and washing hands regularly with soap and water or using hand sanitizer.”
For now, there does not appear to be an outbreak, but, as cases of COVID-19 rise around the world—in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the number of infections is growing in 36 states—it’s inevitable that the virus would make an appearance at the Olympics, where thousands of athletes and millions of spectators have gathered.
But the rules surrounding COVID-19—including vaccination recommendations, who gets tested, isolation procedures, and masking guidance—are very different at the Paris Games than they were during the Tokyo Olympics. In Tokyo, in the summer of 2021, athletes—and the media who had contact with them in interview zones—were tested regularly. Anyone testing positive was immediately isolated and remained separated from others until they tested negative. While vaccination wasn’t mandated, most national Olympic sports organizations, including the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), strongly recommended that athletes be up-to-date with their COVID-19 shot. Officials also conducted temperature checks for anyone entering any competition to monitor for fevers, one symptom of an infection. To further limit the possibility of an outbreak, no spectators were allowed at those Games.
In Paris, the fans are back, virtually none of them wearing masks, and there is no regular testing of athletes. A spokesperson for the USOPC said in emailed responses to questions from TIME that American athletes are generally tested only if they have symptoms such as a persistent cough, fever, or sore throat, or if they are just generally feel unwell, and COVID-19 is being treated like any other respiratory illness such as the cold or flu. That means there is no rule preventing athletes from training or competing, just as there isn’t anything from stopping someone with the sniffles or a stuffy nose.
To protect other Olympians, however, since athletes share rooms and countries occupy the same living space in the Olympic Village, if athletes test positive, they are generally moved to a single room to limit the chance of getting others sick. The USOPC is also arranging for separate transportation for them to and from practices and events and delivering their meals so they won’t need to be in the public dining hall. Medical clinics at the Olympics also have isolation rooms to accommodate people who test positive.
“We will allow them to train and compete as long as they feel up to it,” the USOPC spokesperson said.
Those practices follow guidance from the CDC, which advises people who test positive to stay home and away from others but suggest returning to normal activities when symptoms have improved and any fever has resolved on its own (without medications) for at least 24 hours. People can still spread the virus at that point, so the CDC recommends frequent hand-washing, wearing masks, and practicing social distancing in crowded indoor settings for at least five days. “Keep in mind that you may still be able to spread the virus that made you sick, even if you are feeling better,” the agency says on its website. “You are likely to be less contagious at this time, depending on factors like how long you were sick or how sick you were.”
The cases involving water sports raises the question of whether being in the water with infected athletes increases the risk of spread. Early in the pandemic, the CDC advised that pools don’t carry any heightened risk of spreading the virus, but the enclosed spaces people use for swimming such as locker rooms, showers, and the pool area itself might promote transmission because of the poor ventilation in those areas.
The Paris 2024 spokesperson said “we are carefully monitoring the health situation in close coordination with the Ministry of Health.”
The Olympics are all about the unexpected. And for marathon swimmers and triathletes, that includes a notoriously unpredictable partner—the venue, which is typically an ocean, a lake or, in the case of the Paris Olympics, the city’s historic river Seine.
As iconic as the Seine is, with its picturesque vantage points of city landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Musee d’Orsay, it’s also a contaminated body of water. There are enough risks to human health that the city has banned swimming in the Seine for more than 100 years.
But Olympic organizers wanted to change that, even temporarily, by staging the marathon swimming and swimming portion of the triathlon in the river, and poured $1.5 billion into building a huge tank under the Seine to hold stormwater during heavy rains and storms. The water in the tank is then funneled, gradually, into a wastewater facility where it is treated and then the clean water is flowed back into the Seine. Engineers also upgraded sewage pipes from boats and docks along the Seine to limit the amount of contaminated sewage seeping into the river.
But as of the end of July, testing continues to reveal unsafe levels of bacteria—particularly E. coli and enterococcus—in the water. The levels vary, depending on a number of factors, from the amount of rain to the number of sunny days and the speed of the current in the river. From June 24 to July 2, the river was acceptable for swimming, by European standards, on six out of nine days, according to weekly reports published by Paris officials.
Still, in an effort to demonstrate to the world their confidence in the cleanliness and safety of the Seine, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and Paris 2024 organizing committee president Tony Estanguet, dove in for a few minutes on July 17, even dunking their heads underwater for a few freestyle strokes. “After the Games we will have a swimming pool in the river for all the people,” Hidalgo said after her dip.
Whether that happens still remains uncertain. The ultimate decision on whether to hold the marathon swimming and swimming portion of the triathlon in the river will be made by the respective sports’ governing bodies, depending on data gathered by Paris officials from the day before and morning of the scheduled events. According to Reuters, a meeting with the stakeholders—Paris officials, Paris 2024 Olympic authorities, the sport’s federation, regional authorities, and Meteo France (the country’s meteorological organizations)—will occur at 3:30 a.m. Paris time on each event day to make a final decision on whether the athletes will compete in the Seine.
That’s assuming, of course, that the lab testing for E.coli can be done quickly enough to provide reliable measurements, says Natalie Exum, assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It takes about 24 hours to culture E. coli bacteria,” she says. “There may be some other proxy indicator for bacteria that they are using, but it’s not like you can stick something in the water and know how many E. coli are present in that instant.”
If the river continues to have fluctuating levels of pollutants, there are health risks athletes might face if officials decide the river is safe to swim in during the scheduled event. The most common organic contaminants—E. coli and enterococcus bacteria—are responsible for gastrointestinal illnesses, including diarrhea, abdominal cramps, vomiting and nausea—not something anyone welcomes, not the least athletes who need to be in peak physical condition for competition. “There are certain pathogenic strains of E. coli that cause what we call traveler’s diarrhea,” says Dr. Susan Kline, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Kline says anyone exposed to untreated water might expect risks similar to those that campers might face in rivers or lakes, which include parasites like giardia.
Then there are the possible chemical pollutants that come from runoff from industrial waste, which could pose serious health risks, as well as skin irritation. And having cuts or open wounds on the skin could also increase the risk of any infection from whatever is in the water, says Dr. Timothy Brewer, professor of medicine at epidemiology at University of California Los Angeles.
It’s not as if the sewage system in Paris and the river are intentionally connected. During heavy rain falls, the sewage flowing into water treatment plants gets mixed with overflow water from the rains, and the facilities’ normal treatment systems become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of water that needs to be treated. Some of that untreated water then flows into the Seine, contaminating the river. “We call that first flush,” says Exum of the flood of water that gushes through wastewater treatment plants in the aftermath of a rainfall. “I would not advise anybody anywhere in the world to swim in a river 24 hours after a major flush,” she says. “The whole sewer system is designed to manage the low flow capacity of toilets, not gushing water. These systems are not designed for the intensity of rain events that we are now seeing as a result of climate change.”
Even with a heavy rain, ordinarily, a certain amount of sewage-derived bacteria could also be killed off by the ultraviolet rays of the sun, and higher temperatures. But a rainy and cloudy spring in Paris have left conditions ripe for the bacteria to thrive in the river. And the forecast for the first week of the Games is cloudy. Even with the overflow tank officials built to catch sewage during downpours, the river continues to host unsafe levels of bacteria.
The tank is an important, but not sufficient step to truly getting the Seine clean, says Exum. “To decouple the rainwater system from the sewer system all throughout Paris is what essentially needs to happen but that takes decades, and is an iterative process.” Cities like Paris that don’t host too many green spaces to soak up rainwater end up sending most of it into the sewer system underground, which just builds up the pollution in the river.
Organizers told Reuters that the Seine’s water will be tested twice daily as the Games approach, and that there is an alternative venue for marathon swimming at Vaires-sur-Marne, and a contingency plan to delay the triathlon or drop the swimming portion altogether if the river is deemed unsafe on competition days. But no official announcement has been made, and for now, the two Seine events are scheduled for the city’s river.
The uncertainty is adding additional stress to an already fraught situation for athletes, who would welcome some decision on where, and if, they will be competing, and reassurance that they will be safe while doing so. Team USA open water coach Ron Aitken told USA Today that the lack of a decision is “irresponsible.”
“I think that even if there is a 1% chance that the race isn’t going to be held because of cleanliness or lack of cleanliness, you need to have a backup plan,” Aitken said. “It’s the Olympics.”
More than 184 million people—about 61% of U.S. adults—are likely to have some type of cardiovascular disease by 2050, the American Heart Association (AHA) reported earlier this month. That will lead to a tripling in the costs related to heart disease. It’s a statistic that TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park cited to begin her discussion about the future of healthcare with AHA CEO Nancy Brown; cardiologist Kiran Musunuru; and Andres Acosta, associate professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, for a TIME100 Health panel in New York on Tuesday.
The event was sponsored by AHA and is part of the TIME100 Talks series. The TIME100 Health list includes the most influential people in the health industry around the world.
Heart disease has been the leading killer of Americans since 1950. Brown, who has been CEO of the AHA since 2008, said the number of people in the U.S. living with the risk of heart disease—and the resulting cost—is “staggering.” Part of the issue, she said, is the lack of equal access to healthcare and to social determinants of health, such as healthy food and a living wage. But another issue is the way the U.S. healthcare system approaches these types of medical conditions.
“I think that this country focuses a lot on treating conditions,” Brown said. “But we’re not focusing enough on prevention and helping people earlier in their lives understand the power of things that make a difference in their life. You know, 80% of cardiovascular disease is preventable.”
Musunuru, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said cardiovascular disease can be attributed to about half genetics and about half environment or lifestyle. There are ways to reduce risk factors for developing cardiovascular disease, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and even obesity. The challenge, he said, is that these risk factors develop over time. And the country’s current healthcare system attempts to cope with chronic disease with chronic treatment. While there can be merits to that approach, Musunuru said, it also puts “an outsized burden” on patients.
He suggested the healthcare system shift its focus to preventing chronic diseases, starting at an early age—like we do with vaccines to prevent infectious diseases.
“You’re not going to eliminate heart disease, but can you push off heart attack and stroke by decades?” Musunuru said. “Instead of suffering a bad heart attack at age 60, maybe dying from it, it happens at age 100 and you enjoy 40 years of life you might not have otherwise had.”
Acosta, who codirects the Nutrition Obesity Research Program and directs the Precision Medicine for Obesity Program at Mayo Clinic, discussed how some treatments can also help with reducing the risk of other diseases. Obesity, for instance, is one of the major risk factors for heart disease, and weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound are having a significant impact on treating it. AHA previously reported that people taking Wegovy decreased their risk of heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular issues by 20%, compared to those taking a placebo. Acosta said this data was a “game changer” and marked a “new era” in the management of obesity and cardiovascular disease.
The panelists also highlighted the importance of genetic testing. Few people have their genetics tested, Brown said, and a priority for the AHA is encouraging people to do so.
Musunuru researches the genetics of heart disease and aims to identify genetic factors that protect against disease. Having genetic information, he said, can help medical practitioners know early on what patients’ risks are for developing certain diseases and can allow patients to take a “proactive” approach to their health.
“Your genes are the same on the day you’re born as the day you die,” Musunuru said. “If you know what’s in your genes at the time you’re born, that gives you a forecast of what your life will look like as it unfolds.”
TIME100 Talks: Reimagining the Future of Healthcare was presented by the American Heart Association.
TIME celebrated on Monday the 100 most influential people leading change in health at a special dinner. The first TIME100 Health list spotlights doctors, scientists, business leaders, advocates, and others at the forefront of big changes in the industry.
After a panel discussion on prioritizing women’s health, three TIME100 Health honorees gave toasts about surviving noma, a severe gangrenous disease of the mouth and face; the healthcare advocates pioneering research and treatments related to COVID; and hospitals under attack in conflict zones.
Surviving noma
Fidel Strub, a survivor of Noma, has led an awareness campaign on the disease, which mostly affects malnourished young children living in extreme poverty. In 2023, the WHO officially recognized noma as a neglected tropical disease, noting that early detection is essential for effective treatment. Noma can be fatal and severely disfigure its victims; it typically begins as inflammation of the gums, before destroying facial tissues and bones if left untreated.
Strub thanked his doctor for saving his life and spoke about turning to advocacy to feel empowered. He noted the 27 surgeries he underwent to reconstruct his face. “When Dr. Zala first saw me, I was just skin and bones. He had very little hope, but still he literally fought to save my life,” Strub said. “Just learning to blow out a candle took me three years through speech therapy.”
COVID response pioneers
Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, shouted out more than a dozen TIME100 Health honorees who helped shape the world’s response to the pandemic. “Somehow during the course of the pandemic I went from a cardiologist to a covidologist,” he said. “I never planned for that.”
Topol says that Monday’s event is the first time he has met many of these people working on COVID solutions in person—even though he has become close friends with some. Among those he recognized were researchers who have closely followed Long Covid: Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Hospitals under attack
Alaa Murabit—director of global policy, advocacy, and communications for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—spoke about starting her medical career in a conflict zone and how she is inspired by frontline health workers in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, and Sudan.
Murabit said in her toast that healthcare facilities have been increasingly caught in political violence over the last year. “Hospitals, which are meant to be places of healing and hope—I always say that a hospital is more spiritual to me than any mosque, church or synagogue because you hear more prayers in it—become at best overburdened and at worst, attacked,” she said. “It will come as no surprise to many of you that, in those moments of crisis and insecurity, it is women and children who are the most vulnerable. Violence exacerbates infectious disease, it exacerbates malnutrition and maternal and child death.”
Murabit spoke in particular about Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed more than 35,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. She pointed out how most of those killed are believed to be women and children.
Murabit also paid tribute to female healthcare workers—noting that they make up more than two-thirds of the healthcare workforce. “They are on the frontlines of delivering care in the worst of circumstances,” she said. “We’ve been talking about everything from hyperemesis to menopause to COVID; you can imagine how much worse those are when there are bombs and bullets overhead.”
The TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was presented by Eli Lilly, Northwell Health, Deloitte, On Purpose, A Podcast by Jay Shetty, and Apeiron Investments.
In 2018, we worked with Bill Gates on a special issue of TIME dedicated to the power of optimism. Gates’ view, shared by many of the issue’s contributors, was that people are wired to focus on when things go wrong and when they don’t work. Sometimes this attention distracts us from the moments when progress is being made. Journalists fall prey to this phenomenon as much as anyone else.
As we put together this issue, I was reminded of the conversations with Gates that led to that project. With guidance from Dr. David Agus and Arianna Huffington, our team of health correspondents and editors, led by Emma Barker and Mandy Oaklander, spent months consulting sources and experts around the world to select the 100 individuals who are most influential in the world of health right now. The result is the TIME100 Health, a community of leaders from across industries—scientists, doctors, advocates, educators, and policy-makers, among others—dedicated to creating tangible, credible change for a healthier population. Together, they are a reminder that many things are going right, and their work is enough to inspire the belief that the world of health is in the middle of a golden age of accomplishment and transformation.
While the global pandemic made painfully clear the distances we still have to go to create a healthy and safe world, our emergence from that period has also put a light on the many ways humanity is making progress. Renewed investment and attention is driving a boom in drug discovery and disease eradication.
The TIME100 Health includes a group of scientists—Dan Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, and Svetlana Mojsov—whose discoveries led to the GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes drugs like Ozempic; Khaled Kabil, who ran a program that rid Egypt of hepatitis C infections, despite the nation’s having one of the highest rates in the world just 10 years ago; French neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine and Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, who created a brain-spine implant that enabled a paralyzed man to walk again; Peter Attia, who may be the reason your friend is embracing a high-protein diet; Jonathan Haidt, whose hit book The Anxious Generation is leading a call to ban cell phones in schools and keep kids off social media until they’re 16; and immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki, one of the foremost Long COVID researchers, who is developing a nasal COVID-19 vaccine that she hopes could prevent infection—and thus long-term symptoms—altogether. Health innovation, like this list, reflects humanity at its best: people using all their resourcefulness and ingenuity to help one another live better.
The introduction of the TIME100 Health is part of our ongoing effort to expand the TIME100, the world’s most influential community, into the sectors that may do the most to define our future—artificial intelligence, climate, and health. Whether you are familiar with the individuals on this list or this is the first time you’re reading about them, their work is changing the lives of people in your community and around the world. We are thrilled to announce the first TIME100 Health and looking forward to May in New York City, when we will gather this group together in person for the first time.
The Covid-19 pandemic made issues with access to medical care apparent. At the Time100 Summit on Wednesday, three healthcare officials discussed how the concept of meeting people where they are could help improve the whole industry.
Dr. Toyin Ajayi, the CEO and co-founder of Cityblock Health, Dr. Raj Panjabi, a former White House senior director and special assistant to President Joe Biden, and Dr. Luther T. Clark, the deputy chief patient officer at Merck, each pointed to their own versions of bringing health care to people in a conversation moderated by TIME Senior Health Correspondent Alice Park. (Merck is a 2024 Time100 Summit partner).
Panjabi finished his tenure in the White House in 2023, after working on the government’s action plan in response to Covid-19, which included coordinating a vast vaccination effort. During the emergency, he said their “high-tech, high-touch approach” to community health care—such as holding clinics in community spaces, mailing at-home tests to people, and expanding telehealth capabilities—can be applied to help with maternal birth outcomes and opioid addiction.
“This mantra that really emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘meet people where they are,’ was responsible for helping ensure that hundreds of millions of shots went into Americans’ arms, three million deaths were averted, a trillion dollars of economic losses were prevented,” Panjabi said.
Ajayi built Cityblock Health on those principles as well. She noted that a traditional model of patients going to a doctor’s office during the workday does not work for many people with inflexible work schedules, transit restrictions or parenting responsibilities. At Cityblock, physicians make multiple home visits to patients, establishing trust and being available for early interventions in any health conditions.
“Imagine the feeling as a clinician if you completely flip the paradigm,” Ajayi said. “The respect that you infuse in that relationship is really powerful.”
The business model works, she explained, by reducing healthcare costs related to these patients down the line—costly visits to the emergency room, which often become the only option for people who couldn’t see a doctor sooner. Panjabi pointed to Cityblock Health as the kind of organization the industry and government needs to prioritize scaling up.
Clark pointed to the benefit of community involvement during the research and development of new drug therapies as well.
“One of the areas of focus is bringing the voice of patients into the work we do,” said Clark. “Patients are the beneficiaries of any new medical interventions, so that involving them in those decisions—bringing their insights, their perspectives, what’s important to them—to our work is critically important. It helps us in developing therapies that are more patient-centered, patient-friendly.”
In that way, pharmaceutical companies can not only make treatments more representative of different communities, but also can overcome barriers they face in reaching those communities, such as a lack of trust.
“When you bring patients into this process they not only contribute to advancing the science, but also to developing health care solutions that improve health care that ultimately may advance equity,” Clark said.
The TIME100 Summit convenes leaders from the global TIME100 community to spotlight solutions and encourage action toward a better world. This year’s summit features a variety of speakers across a diverse range of sectors, including politics, business, health and science, culture, and more.
Speakers for the 2024 TIME100 Summit include actor Elliot Page, designer Tory Burch, Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad, WNBA champion A’ja Wilson, author Margaret Atwood, NYSE president Lynn Martin, comedian Alex Edelman, professor Yoshua Bengio, 68th Secretary of State John Kerry, actor Jane Fonda, and many more.
The TIME100 Summit was presented by Booking.com, Citi, Merck, Northern Data Group, Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whisky, and Verizon.
