Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Despite this uninspiring statistic about how many lives a doctor saves, some doctors have had much more impact than this.
Let's look at some examples from the highest-impact careers in history and see what we might learn from them.
First, let's turn to medical research.
By 1968, it had been shown that a solution of glucose and salt administered via a feeding tube or intravenous drip could prevent death due to cholera.
But millions of people were still dying every year from the disease.
While working in a refugee camp on the border of Bangladesh and Burma, Dr. David Nyland sought to turn this insight into a therapy that could be used in poor rural areas.
He showed in a study that simply drinking a solution made at the right concentration and consumed at the right rate could be almost as effective as delivery via feeding tube or IV.
This meant the treatment could be delivered with no equipment and using extremely cheap and widely available ingredients.
Since then, this astonishingly simple treatment has been used all over the world and the annual rate of child deaths from diarrhea has plummeted from around 5 million to 1.5 million.
Researchers estimate that the therapy has saved over 50 million lives to date, mostly children's.
If Dr. Nyland had not been around, somebody else would, no doubt, have discovered this treatment eventually.
However, even if we imagine that he sped up the rollout of the treatment by only five months, his work alone would have saved about 500,000 lives.
This is a very approximate estimate, but it makes his impact more than 100,000 times greater than that of an ordinary doctor.
But even just within medical research, Dr. Nyland is far from the most extreme example of a high-impact career.
For example, one estimate puts Karl Landstein as discovery of blood groups as saving tens of millions of lives by enabling transfusions.
Beyond the medical field, later in the guide we'll cover the stories of a hugely impactful mathematician, Alan Turing, and bureaucrat Viktor Zhdanov.
Or let's think even more broadly.
Roger Bacon and Galileo pioneered the scientific method, without which none of the discoveries we discovered above would have been possible, along with other major technological breakthroughs like the Industrial Revolution.
These individuals were able to do vastly more good than even outstanding medical practitioners.
Or consider the story of Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army during the Cold War.
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