Atul Gawande Quote
It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, Old age is a continuous series of losses. Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.
Atul Gawande
It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, Old age is a continuous series of losses. Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.
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About Atul Gawande
In public health, he was chairman of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On 20 June 2018, Gawande was named CEO of healthcare venture Haven, owned by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase, and stepped down as CEO in May 2020, remaining as executive chairman while the organization sought a new CEO.
He is the author of the books Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance; The Checklist Manifesto; and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
On 9 November 2020, he was named a member of President-elect Joe Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board. On 17 December 2021, he was confirmed as Assistant Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, and was sworn in on 4 January 2022. He left this position on January 20, 2025.