It’s hard to find a group of speakers that are as famous, as inspiring, or as successful as those found at TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design – and occasionally- Medicine. TEDMED is the medically inclined offshoot of TED, and is run by Marc Hodosh and Richard Saul Wurman. The list of TED and TEDMED speakers is impressive. We’ve already shown you Catherine Mohr, Neil Gershenfeld, Eric Giler and many others. There’s about to be a whole new batch of videos as TEDMED 2009 takes off October 27th in San Diego. With more than 50 presentations, this year is going to be amazing.
Each TEDMED speaker is at the top of their field. We have spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra, public health figures like CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, and Singularity Hub regulars like 23andMe‘s Anne Wojiciki. Of course, sprinkled into the conference are more familiar names like Martha Stewart, Goldie Hawn, and David Blaine. Each presenter, celebrity or otherwise, has a tale to tell about the past, present, and future of medicine. There is literally no other conference on Earth that has such a diverse and star studded set of speakers.
The great thing about TEDMED presentations is that they focus in on developments that the speaker finds as amazing as the audience. Every TED video I’ve ever seen has shown me individuals who are excited and moved by the topics they discuss. These people love to present what they excel at, and that sort of enthusiasm combined with competence really makes TEDMED stand out.
If you want to know what each guest will focus on, just go to the TEDMED speakers page and start browsing through head shots of the attendees. While the topic of the presentation isn’t stated outright, you can get a good idea of what each will discuss just by reading their bio. I’m really interested to see if Anne Wojiciki gives us updates on how the ‘research revolution’ at 23andMe is coming along.
Want to attend? You’ll need $4000 and a time machine. Tickets for this year are sold out and they come at a hefty premium. If you think you’ll be willing to shell out four grand next year, you need to get on the mailing list so that you can sign up for next year’s conference. I don’t want to come off as a fanboy, but attending TED or TEDMED would be a dream come true. If you’ve got an extra (and amazingly discounted) ticket let me know. I’ll trade you a blog post for it.
