From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I learned that even if I lost every limb, my core identity – a hardworking, competitive, fun-loving person – would remain intact. My physical abilities as an amputee changed, but not my fundamental self. It was a powerful realization: my true essence is untouchable.
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing.
In the future, these kinds of blood tests will become commonplace. They will allow us to offer treatments for Alzheimer's disease 10, 20, or even 30 years before symptoms start to manifest, much like how we currently handle cholesterol. This early detection and intervention will be our strategy for combating Alzheimer's.
HIV/AIDS is the greatest pandemic in human history. It is chronic pandemic, in the sense that its rise and fall is measured in decades. The known part of this pandemic is now three decades old, and it has several decades still to run.
The environment at work directly influences how individuals interact with their families. If someone has endured a challenging day, feeling undervalued, they're likely to carry that negativity home. On the contrary, when treated with respect, they return home with a positive demeanour.
Soldiers don't get post-traumatic stress on the battlefield, they get it when they get return. When you're there, on the battlefield, life is simple. You have a mission, a purpose, a direction, and you're trying to survive. When you come home, that's when you have to reconcile your humanity with who you are.
When I first began, the word 'miscarriage' was so heavy on my tongue that I couldn't utter it. The sense of shame was so overwhelming. There's this societal expectation that women's bodies are designed for childbearing, yet there's a deafening silence around what to do when things don't go as planned.
The cost of inaction far exceeds the cost of action. Every day we delay comprehensive HIV programs, we're not just counting dollars - we're counting lives.
Smell is an outlier. The brain essentially sent out a little tentacle into the world, those nerve fibres are the only contact between the central nervous system and the external world. This is the point at which there is no barrier between the brain and the outside world.
Lack of sleep is like a broken water pipe in your home, it leaks water into every nook and cranny, and erodes the fabric of your DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.
In my research spanning the last decade, it struck me that we might be conducting a massive, uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation of humans, without fully understanding the potential ramifications. We're all altering our behaviors due to the advent of mobile information, media, and communications technology.
That experience [of being tortured] has altered my whole life. You can never be the same person and anything you do is in reference to that moment. I have never been able to pass it.