Atul Gawande

Both his parents were doctors, Marathi immigrants who settled in Athens, Ohio, so he grew up in a small college town rather than a hospital city. Stanford came first, then Balliol College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship, for a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. Politics came before medicine and nearly instead of it. He volunteered for Gary Hart at 18, worked for Al Gore, researched health care for a Tennessee congressman, and in 1992 walked out of Harvard Medical School after two years to run health policy on Bill Clinton's campaign. In the administration he directed one of the three committees of the health care task force, supervising 75 people writing benefit packages. He found the work frustrating, went back, and took his medical degree in 1995.

Slate and then The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1998, gave him a second job that fed the first. Complications was a National Book Award finalist in 2002. Being Mortal, in 2014, went to the top of the bestseller list by asking what medicine owes the people it cannot fix. Between them came the work he is most cited for. In 2007 the World Health Organization put him in charge of an effort to cut deaths in surgery, and roughly 200 medical societies and health ministries helped produce an operating-room safety checklist, published in 2008. He co-founded Lifebox to get pulse oximeters and training into operating rooms in poor countries and chaired it until 2022, and he chaired Ariadne Labs, the health systems center at Harvard and the Brigham.

Three of the largest companies in America hired him in June 2018 to fix American health care. Haven, owned jointly by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, made Gawande its chief executive. He stepped down in May 2020, and in January 2021 Haven closed — insiders told CNBC that each of the three founding companies had gone on running its own projects with its own staff, which left the joint venture nothing to do. The confirmation fight for his USAID post ran on a similar logic. Marco Rubio held up the committee vote in October 2021 over an article Gawande had written in Slate in 1998 on late abortion, calling the position disqualifying. The committee reported him out anyway in November, and the Senate confirmed him 48 to 31.

His most durable idea is also his least glamorous. The Lancet called the surgical checklist a tangible instrument to promote safety and located its real value in the fact that it makes an operating team talk to one another and keeps pushing further reform. Gawande served as USAID's assistant administrator for global health from January 4, 2022, until January 20, 2025, when the second Trump administration took office. He has spent the period since arguing in public against the dismantling of that agency, including in a New Yorker documentary on what the collapse has done overseas. He is back at Ariadne Labs and Harvard and still writing. What he built at USAID has not had its verdict yet.

Atul Gawande's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science book
  A National Book Award finalist, built out of his Slate and New Yorker pieces 2002
• Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance book
  Diligence, doing right and ingenuity, plus doctors at executions 2007
• WHO Surgical Safety Checklist other
  Produced with about 200 medical societies and health ministries 2008
• The Checklist Manifesto book
  The argument that complex work needs a list, not more brilliance 2009
• Lifebox company
  Co-founded with Pauline Philip to put oximeters and training into poor countries' operating rooms 2011
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End book
  A number one bestseller, and a PBS Frontline documentary in 2015 2014

• November 5, 1965 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn to two doctors who had emigrated from India
• 1987 aged ~22 Graduates from Stanford and goes to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar
• 1992 aged ~27 Leaves medical school after two years for the Clinton campaign He directed one of three committees of the health care task force, with 75 staff.
• 1998 aged ~33 Becomes a staff writer at The New Yorker while still a surgical resident
• 2006 aged ~41 Named a MacArthur Fellow
• 2008 aged ~43 The WHO publishes the surgical safety checklist he led
• June 20, 2018 aged 52 Named chief executive of Haven The joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. It closed in January 2021.
• January 4, 2022 aged 56 Sworn in at USAID as assistant administrator for global health Confirmed 48 to 31 after Marco Rubio held up the committee vote.
• January 20, 2025 aged 59 Leaves USAID as the second Trump administration begins He has argued publicly against the dismantling of the agency ever since.

• Jeff Bezos b. 1964
  Founder of Amazon who transformed e-commerce and cloud computing, becoming one of the wealthiest people in history. hired him to run Haven
• Warren Buffett b. 1930
  Value investor whose disciplined approach built one of the largest personal fortunes in American history. co-owner of Haven
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. cited his McAllen essay
• Paul Farmer 1959–2022
  Physician and anthropologist who built influential models for delivering high-quality care in impoverished communities. global health contemporary
• Malcolm Gladwell b. 1963
  Staff writer for The New Yorker whose books on social science became publishing phenomena. New Yorker colleague