Gloria White-Hammond, MD, MDiv
" Go beyond the place that feels comfortable and remember that none of you got here on your own merits. We are all here because somebody decided not to shrink back."

A pastor and pediatrician active in community and faith-based initiatives that address the needs of high-risk youth, Gloria White-Hammond is also a medical missionary. She has made five visits to Sudan, helping to obtain the freedom of 10,000 women and children enslaved during the 20-year civil war. Making an emotional connection between their lives and those of her own ancestors, who had been slaves in America, she resolved to do something about their plight. There have been times when the task has seemed overwhelming. But rather than succumb, she drew strength from a favorite text. It begins, "In the face of adversity we do not shrink back, because we don't come from people who shrink back. We come from people who persevere and do what they've been called to do.

"I did not get to this place because I came from people who shrunk back," she says. "I came from people who were also slaves and the descendents of slaves; who looked at a difficult situation, who held their heads high and straightened up their backs and said, 'We will overcome.'" And she knew she could never give up. Next month she returns to Sudan for the sixth time.

Bruce Walker, MD
" We have the opportunity to salvage a lasting positive legacy from the horrors of the AIDS epidemic because we have the attention of people like never before on global health."

Bruce Walker's interest in HIV/AIDS began in the early 1980s. A physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and now director of the Partners AIDS Research Center, his breakthrough research includes a current project to create a digital camera-sized diagnostic tool that can perform a cheap and rapid test of a patient's immune-system health. The device was inspired by Walker's experiences in Africa, where diagnostic equipment is too costly and cumbersome to be useful to most patients.

Having been instrumental in the progress of HIV/AIDS treatment in the US, Walker has set progress in motion in heavily infected parts of Africa. He procured a $5 million grant that built a state-of-the art biomedical research institute at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in South Africa and spearheaded a community-based program providing HIV medication to the poor. The program has already saved 167 lives.

Susan M. Briggs, MD, MPH, FACS
Disasters require new ideas from everyone. "Each and every one of you is a disaster responder."

Susan M. Briggs, MD, MPH, FACS Susan Briggs, attending general and trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, established and directs the International Medical Surgical Response Team, which dispatches New England medical personnel to emergencies around the globe. She led teams to the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and to Bam, Iran, which suffered a devastating earthquake in December. "Responding to complex disasters is like playing a game which you don't fully understand, and for which the rules have not been explained very well," she says. Each presents special challenges. Ground Zero was a lesson in planning and ideas: "We spent a lot of time realizing that we are not 18-year-old marines who can carry 70 pounds on our backs." In Bam, the complexities centered on climate-not only the austere desert, but a difficult religious, cultural and political climate.

Despite such differences, disasters are in many ways "all the same," Briggs contends. And whether they are natural, manmade or terrorist, "good intentions and a surge capacity are not enough. We need well-trained people in all disciplines. We need new ideas of how we can be more effective. And politics play a bigger role than our lack of resources, personnel and supplies."

Tracy Kidder
"If we can treat and prevent a disease like AIDS in a place like rural Haiti, then we have no excuse for not doing the same thing everywhere."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder has spent his career writing about so-called ordinary people: a team of computer engineers, a schoolteacher, the residents of a nursing home. "No human being is really ordinary," he asserts. But the subject of his latest book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, is "less ordinary than any ordinary person I've ever met." Indeed, Paul Farmer, a physician, infectious disease specialist and Harvard professor of medicine and medical anthropology, is far from ordinary. He devotes his career to serving the world's poor. Establishing medical facilities in the most inhospitable environments, he has worked tirelessly to stanch the twin epidemics of HIV and TB in such places as Siberia, Lima, and most notably, Haiti, where a public health system he created serves as a "laboratory for the world."

Kidder describes Farmer's life story as "a moral adventure." Farmer and his colleagues have set up a daunting challenge. "What they've proven, is that the entire range of human ailments, including AIDS, can be treated successfully and very economically in one of the world's most difficult settings: a place without clean water, roads or sufficient food," says Kidder. In other words, political excuses for the failure to help are only that-excuses.

Barry Bluestone, PhD
" Nikita Khrushchev is responsible for the economic boom in the US in the 1990s."

According to conventional economic wisdom, which Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone calls "the Wall Street model," the 1990s economic boom resulted from stagnating wages (due to weak labor unions, welfare reform and expanded trade with low-wage countries); low inflation (due to tight monetary policy); and a higher savings rate (due to deficit reduction). But most of these factors are still with us, while the boom is clearly over. The boom, Bluestone argues, was based instead on a surge in productivity, which resulted from digital technologies first developed in connection with the space and arms races. In the 1960s, in reaction to Soviet successes in outer space, the US boosted its investment in science research, science education and public infrastructure. In order for America to see the '90s prosperity again, Bluestone says, we need to reinvest in these same areas. "We will sabotage prosperity if we stick to the Wall Street model," he says.

As an alternative, he proposes "the Main Street model," which includes renewed investments in education, research and infrastructure. These investments, he predicts, along with a higher minimum wage and labor law reform, would bring a new boom that would benefit Americans of every economic class.