When I spoke to Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) in 2007, an estimated 2 million people were getting infections in hospitals. 90 thousand of those people died. Often it was because doctors and nurses didn’t wash their hands. Gawande - a surgeon, New Yorker writer and MacArthur Genius - set out to find why. The answer was surprisingly simple, yet extremely difficult to fix. He also talks about the neglected medical specialty of geriatrics, how his medical work relates to his journalism, and how receiving the genius award affected his life. Gawande was one of the most brilliant people I’ve had the opportunity to speak to.
