Epic Measures

Medical doctor and economist Christopher Murray began the Global Burden of Disease study to gain a truer understanding of how we live and how we die. Leading one of the largest scientific projects ever attempted—as ambitious as the first moon landing or the Human Genome Project—the charismatic and controversial health maverick found a way to use Big Data to show that the ideal existence isn’t simply the longest but the one lived well and with the least illness. Along the way, he and his colleagues challenged—and changed—the accepted wisdom of major aid groups, the WHO, and the UN, making enemies but also winning some very influential friends in their ongoing crusade to redefine how we see health and well-being. Moneyball meets medicine in this remarkable chronicle of Murray’s lifelong determination to understand the world’s health problems, told with novelistic verve by acclaimed journalist Jeremy N. Smith. Encompassing wars and famines, presidents and activists, billionaires and billions of people worldwide living in poverty, Epic Measures is the story of one of the greatest scientific quests of our time—and the visionary mastermind behind it.