Among the 25-recipients of the $500,000 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grants’, there are four doctors who have been accorded recognition for their achievements. They include; Regina Benjamin, founder of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, who with the help of volunteers rebuilt it twice, after being destroyed by the Georges and Katrina Hurricanes. Traveling to remote rural areas to treat immobile patients, no one who comes to her clinic is turned away without being treated.

Fifty-eight year old Wafaa El-Sadr, who is based at Columbia University and works in New York and Africa, is the other winner of MacArthur Foundations genius grant.  She recruits homeless TB patients as monitors for other TB patients, ensuring they take their antibiotics as directed. Not only involved in finding effective treatment for TB, she also works to reduce HIV / AIDS transmission from mother-to-child.

Diane Meier is a 56-year old Director of the Centre to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC).  She launched a palliative care centre at Mount Sinai, after witnessing the lack of empathy shown to seriously ill patients, their poorly managed pain, lack of support for family caregivers, not only by doctors, but also the medical health system.

Last but not least, forty-three year old Peter Pronovost at John Hopkins, who came up with a checklist to ensure hospital staff, took standard precautions for reducing risk of infection.  And, he is developing new clinical practices for health care facilities related to enhancement of patient safety and avoidance doctors’ and nurses’ errors.