Atul Gawande

Dr Atul Gawande is a physician, a teacher, an public policy leader, and a writer. His columns in The New Yorker magazine have been some of my favorites pieces of the last few years: filed under "Annals of Public Policy" or "Annals of Medicine" but also "Annals of Human Rights," they talk about subjects ranging from blushing or nausea to solitary confinement as a form of torture. His books on being a surgeon have won awards, and his research and work on improving the safety of health care, among other topics, are important contributions to public health and safety worldwide. Having read his work now for a number of years, I have trust in his ability to communicate complex scientific and social issues in clear, compassionate terms to the general public, but in ways that avoid oversimplification.

His article on how Obama's administration should approach the urgent need to reform our system of health care does something important: it gives us the historical context for understanding how the variety of European national health care systems emerged as responses to particular local arrangements and needs, rather than as ideological master plans; it places the pragmatic approach as an alternative to the idealist (but potentially dangerous) or the free-market (and ineffective) approaches. And it talks about how Massachussets' recent state-wide reforms give us a glimpse of how a national health care reform might work. Here's a bit of an interview with him on Charlie Rose's show:

He reads from his book at a talk he gave for Google employees here. I'm not embedding it because they chose to film him against a hideous yellow background, and positioned an icon of a book right in the back of someone's head. But the story he tells about his medical training as a resident is fascinating: he is fascinated by the intersection of intelligence, competence and those other less well-understood elements of performance that make one doctor better than another. One of his strengths as an intellect is in his ability to think from the local and the material to the level of the global and the systematic.