Although a highly-accomplished conventional doctor, David Agus has embraced the future of medicine and is constantly exploring ways that new technologies can help in the fight against cancer. Why you should listen to him:

David Agus is a medical doctor and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California. However, he is also the founder of a couple of game-changing medical initiatives. In 2006, he co-founded Navigenics with Dietrich Stephan, Ph.D., to form a company that would provide people with their individual genetic information, allowing them to act on any predispositions to disease that they might have and prevent onset. He also founded Oncology.com which was the largest cancer Internet resource and community.

Dr. Agus’ research is focused on the application of proteomics and genomics in the study of cancer, as well as developing new therapeutic treatments for cancer. He serves as Director of the USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine and the USC Westside Prostate Cancer Center. Agus is also the recipient of several honors and awards, including the American Cancer Society Physician Research Award, a Clinical Scholar Award from the Sloan-Kettering Institute and the International Myeloma Foundation Visionary Science Award.

“I believe in educating the next generation about science and medicine. We need new human capital to fight disease.”

Dr. David Agus

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Anthony Atala asks, “Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?” His lab at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is doing just that — engineering tissues and whole organs (bladders and, soon, kidneys) using smart bio-materials and cutting-edge techniques.

Anthony Atala is the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where his work focuses on growing and regenerating tissues and organs. His team engineered the first lab-grown organ to be implanted into a human — a bladder — and is developing experimental fabrication technology that can “print” human tissue on demand.

In 2007, Atala and a team of Harvard University researchers showed that stem cells can be harvested from the amniotic fluid of pregnant women. This and other breakthroughs in the development of smart bio-materials and tissue fabrication technology promises to revolutionize the practice of medicine.

“Anthony Atala bakes things that will make you feel good inside, but we’re not talking cakes and muffins.” PBS

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Since Awakenings first stormed the bestseller lists (and the silver screen), Oliver Sacks has become an unlikely household name, single-handedly inventing the genre of neurological anthropology.

Oliver Sacks is a ground-breaking neurologist — and a gifted storyteller, who has enriched our knowledge of the infinite variations of human psychology. After his pioneering work with “sleepy sickness” patients (who were in fact survivors of an early-20th-century pandemic), Sacks went on to study the connections between music and the brain, as well as disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and many other little-understood disorders that often count Sacks as one of their first chroniclers.

Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. Sacks’ writing, compassion, and wide-ranging knowledge catapults the genre into the 21st century and brings the far frontiers of neurological experience into the view of millions of readers worldwide. He maintains a small practice in New York City.

“Sacks’s writerly form is now its own literary genre. It’s easy to take his originality for granted, to forget how unlikely it is that a book about neurological disorders would become a bestseller, or that a bearded neurologist would become a cultural icon.”

Jonah Lehrer, seedmagazine.com

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Tom Honey, Canon Pastor of Exeter Cathedral, in the UK, is unafraid to take on some of religion’s tougher issues.

Honey’s appeal goes far beyond his own congregation. For years he was the vicar of the church in Oxford attended decades earlier by the Christian thinker C.S. Lewis. The Reverend Honey built a reputation there for thoughtful sermons that disdained cliche or easy answers. They were often willing to grapple with the darker side of life — pain, loss, grief — and the challenges these presented to the concept of a loving God.

These challenges were dramatically highlighted by the devastation of the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004 in which some 300,000 people died, making it one of the worst natural disasters in human history. The sermon penned by Honey shortly after was eloquent and powerful enough to win him an invitation to come speak at TED.

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About Dan Buettner: National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner studies the world’s longest-lived peoples, distilling their secrets into a single plan for health and long life.

Why you should listen to him:

What do Seventh-Day Adventists in California, the residents of Sardinia, Italy and the inhabitants of the islands of Okinawa, Japan have in common? They enjoy the longest, healthiest lives on the planet. Dan Buettner assembled a team of researchers to seek out these “hotspots of human health and vitality,” which he calls Blue Zones, and to figure out what they do that helps them live so long.

Buettner, a world-renowned explorer and a writer for National Geographic, travels the world seeking out new Blue Zones (he’s found five, to date) and speaking at seminars and on TV, sharing the habits that lead to long life. He is the founder of Quest Network, and has set three world records for endurance cycling.

“Dan Buettner takes us on a journey to explore the secrets of longevity and in so doing introduces us to a world of joy in aging … at 91, this is very good news!”

Walter Cronkite

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