Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈhɑːns ˈrûːslɪŋ]; 27 July 1948 – 7 February 2017) was a Swedish physician, academic and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data (and data visualization) to explore development issues. His posthumously published book Factfulness, coauthored with his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund and son Ola Rosling, became an international bestseller.

Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on 28 July 1948. From 1967 to 1974, he studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1972 he studied public health at St. John's Medical College, Bangalore, India. He became a licensed physician in 1976, and from 1979 to 1981, he served as District Medical Officer in Nacala in northern Mozambique. In 1981, he began investigating an outbreak of konzo, a paralytic disease first described in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His investigations earned him a Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 1986. Rosling was dyslexic.

Rosling presented the television documentary The Joy of Stats, which was broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Four in December 2010 and has been made available to 'catch up' on BBC iPlayer since. He presented a documentary, Don't Panic — The Truth about Population, for the This World series using a Musion 3D projection display, which appeared on BBC Two in the UK in November 2013.[16] In 2015 he presented the documentary Don't Panic: How to End Poverty in 15 Years, which was produced by Wingspan and aired on the BBC just ahead of the announcement of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Rosling was a sword swallower, as demonstrated in the final moments of his second talk at the TED conference. In 2009 he was listed as one of the 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy, and in 2011, as one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company. In 2011 he was elected member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and in 2012 as member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was included in the Time 100 list of the world's 100 most influential people in 2012.

When he was 20, in 1968, doctors told Rosling that there was something wrong with his liver, and as a consequence, he stopped drinking alcohol. Aged 29, with a young family, he had testicular cancer, which was successfully treated. In 1989, he was diagnosed with hepatitis C. Over the years, this progressed, and he developed liver cirrhosis. At the beginning of 2013, he was in the early stages of liver failure. However, at the same time, new hepatitis C drugs were released, and he went to Japan to buy the drugs needed to treat the infection. 

He expressed concerns in the media over the restricted use of the new drugs due to high costs, stating that it is a crime not to give every person with hepatitis C access to the drugs. Rosling was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016 and died of the disease on 7 February 2017.