Cracking the ‘TIME Top 100 Most Influential People Of 2017’ list is no small feat.
Although not all the names on the list have brought smiles to everyone’s faces – here’s looking at you, Donald – South African doctor Glenda Gray deserves every bit of recognition she receives for the outstanding work she has done.
Cracking the ‘Pioneer’s section, here’s what TIME’s executive editor Siobhan O’ Connor had to say about Gray:
It can be easy to forget that until recently, HIV was a disease you didn’t talk about. Ironically, that’s what inspired Dr. Glenda Gray to study the virus in the first place. As a young medical student who fought to desegregate hospitals in apartheid-era South Africa, she was alarmed when she started seeing babies dying of a virus that her own government claimed wasn’t causing AIDS.
That’s when the pediatrician in training learned firsthand that with HIV, you’re fighting a battle on two fronts: you’re up against a vicious virus—and the stigma that allowed it to proliferate, unchecked, for so long. Gray decided to fight the virus and the silence around it through research. Thanks in part to her work on mother-to-child transmission, the number of babies born with HIV has dropped from 600,000 a year to 150,000.
Now, she’s set her sights on a way to inoculate infants before they’re ever put at risk. Her ongoing HIV-vaccine study is the largest of its kind ever conducted in South Africa, and with it, Gray is once again doing her part to make sure that the science of HIV—and the conversation around it—never stops evolving.
Sterling work, and the kind of work that far too often goes unnoticed.
While we’re here, should we check out Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan’s writer-up on Donald Trump?
He always finds a way to get it done. When so many, including me at times, didn’t see how he could pull it off, Donald Trump won a historic victory. And in becoming the 45th President of the United States, he completely rewrote the rules of politics and reset the course of this country. A businessman always willing to challenge convention, he has shaken up Washington and laid out an agenda of generational proportions. Never afraid of a battle, he has made it his mission to fight for those who feel forgotten.
Where others would pivot, he stays true to who he is. Where others would turn back, he forges ahead. Up close, I have found a driven, hands-on leader, with the potential to become a truly transformational American figure. I have little doubt that he will, once again, find a way to defy the odds and get it done.
Can you even?
Check out the rest of the TIME Top 100 list HERE.
[source:time]
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