Monica Bertagnolli went from a childhood on a cattle ranch to a career as a surgeon to a top post in the Biden administration. As director of the National Institutes of Health, she’s working to improve the way we find new treatments — despite regulatory constraints and tight budgets.

• SOURCE:
  • Monica Bertagnolli, director of the National Institutes of Health.

• RESOURCES:
  • "Steven Levitt and John Donohue Defend a Finding Made Famous by 'Freakonomics'," by Steven Levitt and John Donohue (The Economist, 2024).
  • "Why 'Freakonomics' Failed to Transform Economics," (The Economist, 2024).
  • "Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics Co-Author and U Chicago Econ Prof) on His Career and Decision to Retire From Academic Economics," by Jon Hartley (The Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Podcast, 2024).
  • "Why Autoimmune Disease Is More Common in Women: X Chromosome Holds Clues," by Elie Dolgin (Nature, 2024).
  • "Casgevy and Lyfgenia: Two Gene Therapies Approved for Sickle Cell Disease," by Carrie MacMillan (Yale Medicine News, 2023).
  • "Fact Sheet: President Biden Reignites Cancer Moonshot to End Cancer as We Know It," (2022).
  • "Mini-Antibodies Discovered in Sharks and Camels Could Lead to Drugs for Cancer and Other Diseases," by Mitch Leslie (Science, 2018).

• EXTRAS:
  • "Who Pays for Multimillion-Dollar Miracle Cures?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2023).
  • "What’s Stopping Us From Curing Rare Diseases?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2023).
  • "Abortion and Crime, Revisited (Update)," by Freakonomics Radio (2022).
  • "John Donohue: 'I’m Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution,'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).

Nobel laureate, bestselling author, and groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman died in March. In 2021 he talked with Steve Levitt — his friend and former business partner — about his book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (cowritten with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein) and much more.

• SOURCES:
  • Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.

• RESOURCES:
  • Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, by Olivier Sibony, Daniel Kahneman, and Cass R. Sunstein (2021).
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (2011).

• EXTRAS:
  • "What’s the Secret to Making a Great Prediction?" by No Stupid Questions (2021).
  • "The Men Who Started a Thinking Revolution," by Freakonomics Radio (2017).
  • "How to Be Less Terrible at Predicting the Future," by Freakonomics Radio (2016).

Google researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas spends his work days developing artificial intelligence models and his free time conducting surveys for fun. He tells Steve how he designed an algorithm for the U.S. Navy at 14, how he discovered the truth about printing-press pioneer Johannes Gutenberg, and when A.I. first blew his mind.

• SOURCE:
  • Blaise Agüera y Arcas, fellow at Google Research.

• RESOURCES:
  • Who Are We Now?, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (2023).
  • "Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here," by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Peter Norvig (Noema Magazine, 2023).
  • "Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding," by Jakob Uszkoreit (Google Research Blog, 2017).
  • "Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data," by H. Brendan McMahan, Eider Moore, Daniel Ramage, Seth Hampson, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas (arXiv, 2016).
  • "How PhotoSynth Can Connect the World's Images," by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (TED Talk, 2007).
  • "Has History Been Too Generous to Gutenberg?" by Dinitia Smith (The New York Times, 2001).

• EXTRAS:
  • "'My God, This Is a Transformative Power,'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
  • "How to Think About A.I.," series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
  • "Satya Nadella’s Intelligence Is Not Artificial," by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
  • "Yul Kwon (Part 2): 'Hey, Do You Have Any Bright Ideas?'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
  • "Yul Kwon: 'Don’t Try to Change Yourself All at Once,'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).