During a busy year in global health, some of the most influential names driving innovation and shaping policy gathered Thursday night at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner.
The 2026 TIME100 Health list honors a diverse group of scientists, doctors, advocates, educators, and other changemakers leading the way in pioneering breakthrough treatments, improving access to care, and creating awareness around emerging issues in public health. The evening featured a panel on preventative care moderated by TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar and ended with a round of toasts from four honorees, who spoke about the importance of long-term funding for health, reinterpreting the story around aging, and altruism to help those in medical need.
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Investing in health
The first toast of the night was given by Dr. Kiran Musunuru, director of the Genetic and Epigenetic Origins of Disease Program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He and Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas used a personalized CRISPR therapy to tweak a mutation that turned the devastating genetic disorder of an infant child named KJ into a manageable condition.
However, he noted that the monumental success of KJ’s treatment is the end result of decades of research that went into achievements like The Human Genome Project, rapid whole-genome sequencing, CRISPR gene editing, lipid nanoparticle formulations, RNA technology, representing the career work of many scientists behind the scenes.
“We’re simply one link in a very long chain … and, of course, no part of that long chain could have been forged without strong support from the federal government” and funding from the National Institutes of Health, he said. “Equally important were the career staff at the Food and Drug Administration, who worked closely with us to strike the right balance of rigor, flexibility, and speed in developing the therapy for KJ.”
As things are starting to get interesting in medicine and health, “now is not the time to take the foot off the accelerator,” he said.
An alternative narrative for aging
The second toast of the night was given by gerontologist Kerry Burnight who coined the term “joyspan” to shift the way people think about aging. “The tragedy of old age is not that we grow old and die. It’s that the process of doing so is made unnecessarily, and at times, excruciatingly painful and humiliating,” she said. While this narrative fuels the lucrative fear-based anti-aging industry, she invites us to visualize an alternative.
“If we, people lucky enough to be aging as well as serving aging humans, see and celebrate the strengths and contributions of older people, rather than fall prey to the fantasy of never dying, not aging,” she said, “we can tackle these daunting challenges that our nation is facing.”
Shrinking the kidney transplant waiting list
Actor and director Jesse Eisenberg, who made a non-directed kidney donation to an anonymous matching patient next on the transplant list last year, closed out dinner with a final toast advocating for spreading the word on altruistic organ donations that could help the more than 90,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant. “I want to acknowledge that I am probably the dumbest person here and the least qualified to be talking right now,” he said, but he focused on what he did have experience in, which was the “risk-free” process behind his organ donation, which he knew he had to do after hearing about the concept of this type of donation on a podcast.
“I never heard from anyone or read an interview with anybody who said they wrestled with the decision. … It was always: ‘I heard about it and signed up,’” he said. “Which makes me wonder if the problem isn’t convincing people to do this, but simply finding the people who already would.”
“That’s the reason I wanted to speak tonight — and to briefly co-opt this gathering of otherwise brilliant minds — because I imagine there is no more qualified group of people who could figure out how to reach these particular people, how to shrink that horrible number of 90,000 people to close to zero.”
TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was presented by Novartis and Aster DM Healthcare.
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