YoIn 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 programmed 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 are victims of this phenomenon as much as anyone else.
As we wrote this issue, I remembered 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 most influential people in the world of health at this time. The result is TIME100 Health, a community of leaders across industries—scientists, clinicians, advocates, educators, and policymakers, 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 healthcare is in the midst of a golden era of achievement and transformation.
While the global pandemic made painfully clear the distances we still have to travel to create a healthy and safe world, our emergence from that period has also shed light on the many ways humanity is progressing. Renewed investment and attention is driving a boom in drug discovery and disease eradication.
TIME100 Health includes a group of scientists (Dan Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst and Svetlana Mojsov) whose discoveries led to GLP-1 diabetes and weight loss drugs like Ozempic; Khaled Kabil, who led a program to rid Egypt of hepatitis C infections, even though the country had one of the highest rates in the world just 10 years ago; the French neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine and the Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, who created an implant in the brain column that allowed a paralyzed man to walk again; Peter Attia, who may be the reason his friend is adopting a high protein diet; Jonathan Haidt, whose best-selling book The anxious generation is leading a call to ban cell phones in schools and keep children off social media until age 16; and immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki, one of Long COVID’s principal investigators, who is developing a nasal COVID-19 vaccine that she hopes can prevent infection and therefore symptoms in the long term. Health innovation, like this list, reflects the best of humanity: people using all their resources and ingenuity to help each other live better.
The introduction of TIME100 Health is part of our ongoing effort to expand TIME100, the world’s most influential community, to the sectors that can do the most to define our future: artificial intelligence, climate and health. Whether you’re familiar with the people 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 look forward to May in New York City, when we will bring this group together in person for the first time.