time100health2024

How We Chose the TIME100 Most Influential People in Health of 2024

By Sam Jacobs

Alex Oshmyansky

By Alice Park

Joel Habener, Dan Drucker, Svetlana Mojsov and Jens Juul Holst

By Alice Park

Melanie Ward

By Jamie Ducharme
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Ivan Cheung

In the pharmaceutical world, where ideas far outnumber marketable products, executives adhere to the motto of “fail often, and fail early,” with the understanding that to do so requires the discipline to know when to...

By Alice Park

Stuart Orkin

Dr. Stuart Orkin didn’t set out to develop a historic treatment for sickle cell disease 45 years ago when he decided to study how blood cells formed. He became a researcher at Harvard Medical School...

By Alice Park

Ronnie Levin

In the next decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aims to replace all the country’s lead pipes. Few did more to bring about the change than Ronnie Levin, who published a cost-benefit analysis in...

By Tara Law

Shahzad Baig

Polio eradication has largely been a global vaccination success story. The disease, which can lead to paralysis or death, mostly in children, now circulates only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the front lines in the...

By Jeffrey Kluger

David Baker

Proteins, each with their own unique three-dimensional architecture, are the body’s molecular tools, adapted to perform the specific tasks necessary for maintaining life. For decades, researchers have modified proteins to augment or alter their function....

By Will Henshall

Georg Schett

In recent years, the new immune-based therapy CAR T has dramatically improved outcomes for patients with certain blood cancers that involve B cells, like leukemia and lymphoma. Dr. Georg Schett, a rheumatologist at the University...

By Alice Park

Jocelyne Bloch and Grégoire Courtine

After a 2011 motorbike accident, Gert-Jan Oskam lost his ability to walk. The portion of his spinal cord that connects to his legs was damaged, severing his brain’s ability to send signals to make his...

By Tara Law

Kim Nolte

In 2023, migrants arrived at the U.S. southern border in record numbers, often malnourished and ill. The Migrant Clinicians Network, based in Austin, offers those with urgent medical needs a lifeline. Kim Nolte, the group’s...

By Sanya Mansoor

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman

They met in the late 1990s at the copier between their labs at the University of Pennsylvania, and that chance meeting led to a history-making vaccine and a Nobel Prize for both. Dr. Drew Weissman...

By Alice Park

Thomas Powles

Bladder cancer is what Dr. Thomas Powles, a urologist at Queen Mary University of London, calls a “Cinderella cancer”: neglected and left behind, attracting little attention or resources. The few treatments aren’t very effective, and...

By Alice Park

Tulio de Oliveira

South Africa may not spring immediately to mind as a hub for virus hunting, but thanks to Brazilian, Portuguese, and South African virus expert Tulio de Oliveira, it’s quickly becoming one. De Oliveira led the...

By Alice Park

Jerry Mendell

In the 1960s, Dr. Jerry Mendell saw his first patient with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. More than half a century later, he developed the first treatment that holds back the disease. People with Duchenne are born...

By Alice Park

Barney Graham

As a virologist at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Vaccine Research Center in the 2000s, Dr. Barney Graham was making a career out of his lifelong fascination with problem-solving that began as a child...

By Alice Park

Jimmy Carter

I never expected the likes of former President Jimmy Carter to traffic much in vanity, but the one time I spoke to him, back in 2006, he allowed himself a tiny flicker of it. At...

By Jeffrey Kluger

Greg Adams

The U.S. health care system is based on a fee-for-service model that drives up costs across the board. Huge disparities in access and quality of care lead to concerning gaps in health outcomes in different...

By Alice Park

Jeremy Farrar

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Jeremy Farrar was thinking about how to keep the world safe from infectious diseases. For more than 30 years, he has dedicated his career to understanding and containing the...

By Jamie Ducharme
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