Barack Obama

An America's choice, the candidate who is radically redefining politics.

Like many who meet him, you just want people of his caliber to lead.

While with other candidates we’ll just sing a same old song, Barack, 46, has already changed American politics. We often hear about the size of the crowds he attracts, as a measure of the excitement about his candidacy. It's the variety of the crowd that is the real phenomenon: little kids who sit on the floor in front of the podium, and the 101 year old gentleman who stood up from his wheelchair in Iowa and said, "I'm with him too." Farmers in overalls next to people in business suits. Every race, religion and creed. Every political party and no party at all.

You can feel their excitement about being in Barack's presence and about being in the presence of one another. They glimpse for a minute what it might be like to find common cause across differences. That's how Barack has changed politics.

Sheik Mohammed al Maktoum

Dubai's visionary wants young Arab minds to reach for the skies.

Where's the tallest building in the world? It should come as no surprise that it's in the realm of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and unlikely poster boy for globalization. When the Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) is completed next year, the 160 plus story spire of offices and luxury apartments will be the latest jewel in the impressive crown that Sheik Mohammed, 58, has been steadily assembling for a quarter century.

Working first as a deputy to his father, the late Sheik Rashid, and since 2006 ruling the country on his own, Sheik Mo (as some of his subjects fondly call him) has transformed the petroleum poor desert emirate into a major global hub for business, finance, trade and tourism. Sheik Mo has made Dubai an internationally recognized synonym for success in a Middle East that has been plagued by war, civil discontent and religious extremism.

His pursuit of excellence extends from business to sports: a champion equestrian, Sheik Mo owns leading stud farms and hosts the world's richest horse race. And it has made him a role model for a new generation of Arab leaders. Last year he set up the Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum Foundation with a $10 billion endowment; it aims to inspire knowledge, ideas and innovation among the builders of tomorrow's Arab world. Dubai's visionary wants young Arab minds, too, to reach for the skies.

Jeff Han - Multitouch computer screens inventor

His multi touch screens turn computer users into virtuosos.

By his own description, he was "one of those troublemaker kids." Five years ahead in math learning levels. A soldering iron in hand at age 6. Taking things apart to see how they worked. Even putting some of them back together.

Han, 32, was an obscure New York University computer science researcher two years ago when he made a presentation introducing the concept of multi touch sensing screens. Now his work is coveted by clients ranging from the CIA to CNN, all of which realize that the era of the single touch screen (think ATMS) is over and the multi touch screen (imagine a piano keyboard on a screen) is upon us.

My fingers are part of that new world. Tune in to CNN on any major election night as I navigate the ever changing map that the folks at CNN call the Magic Wall. CNN owns one map, with a second on the way. The intelligence and military communities use the technology, and Han says new educational, medical and creative applications are in the works.

"Multi touch sensing was designed to allow nontechies to do masterful things while allowing power users to be even more virtuosic," Han says. Count me in the nontechie column. Count me too as someone who believes Han has done more than start a great business; he has also dramatically changed the way we interact with our computers.

Oprah Winfrey

She inspiring her viewers to participate in the democratic process.

Oprah is a wonderful person and an incredible force. Oprah's story is one that truly could happen only in America. After the struggles she endured as a young girl, she became a popular talk show host with a national wide viewers. But she didn’t stop there. Using her platform to serve as a global role model, she challenges us to make the world as it is the world as it should be. And she is always the first to show us how it can be done.

In the past few months, We've had the privilege of watching Oprah inspire thousands of Americans to participate in our democracy. She has also reached out to thousands more who might not have known there was a seat for them at the table at all people who desperately need a voice.

Over the past 20 years, Oprah, 54, has developed and nurtured a relationship with her viewers and readers built on the recognition that there is more that unites us than divides us that our shirred experiences in work, life and love, in family and community, in our hopes and dreams, know no barriers; that regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status or hometown, we are our brothers' keepers, our sisters' keepers.

For this impact on all of us, We should honor her.

J. Craig Venter

The scientist ruffles some feathers, but he has a knack for innovations that change the world.

There have always been two kinds of innovators: those who have an incandescent idea that changes the world and those who keep having them. Increasingly, J. Craig Venter, 61, is establishing himself as a member of that second group.

Already admired as the scientist who conceived of the high speed, "shotgun" approach to DNA sequencing, he was honored last year with a place on the TIME 100 list for his studies involving biodiversity in the oceans. This year he's back for the startling achievement of having built the first synthetic genome. Most of a cell is simply a living enclosure for the DNA that makes an organism what it is. Design and assemble that DNA the way a software designer writes code, and you come awfully close to inventing a living thing. That's what Venter did this year. For now, his work is limited to a one celled organism, but it could advance fast.

So many accomplishments coming so quickly have evoked a range of emotions in Venter's fellow scientists. There has been almost universal admiration, even a touch of envy, but there are people who regard his entrepreneurialism and reported egotism as suspect, which then actually not proved. We should be rewarded him for his bold thinking, ethical sensitivity and creativity. The life of the scientist should be one of imagination and joy—-and in his case, it is. At best, it should yield rewards not just for the person doing the work but also for anyone else who is touched by it. If that's the standard, Venter could be finding his way onto lists like this one for a long time.

Jill Bolte Taylor

A stroke can shatter a life. She used hers to advance science and understanding.
One night, somebody might went to bed able bodied and woke up handicapped. It happened that quickly, as it can to anyone who has a stroke. Some people are totally immobilized, and others recover completely. Jill Bolte Taylor did even better than that.

A neuroanatomist and professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, Taylor, 48, realized one day in 1996 that she was suffering a brain hemorrhage. She felt her faculties slipping away and, as a brain scientist, understood exactly what was happening to her. Over the next decade, she fought to recover her abilities and continue studying the brain through the one she knows best: her own. In 2006 she published her book, A Stroke of Insight, about her experiences and brain science as a field. Through her writings and lectures, she has done perhaps more than anyone else to explain, both to the healthy and the stricken, what a stroke is.

Those of us struggling with the residual effects of stroke certainly don't need to be reminded of what it means when the brain is damaged. Some of us must struggle with the day by day frustrations of not being able to mount a flight of stairs, pick up a piece of paper or cross the room to get a magazine. But there is comfort in better grasping what has gone wrong, and enlightenment for those around you when they grasp it too. None of us needs sympathy; what we do need is a helping hand and understanding. Someone like Taylor provides that, helping a terrible blow become far less so.

Michael Bloomberg

His main aim is to make New York City a safe and livable environmental model for the rest of the planet.

Our most critical environmental issues is the challenge of making our cities attractive, enriching and safe places to live. The best cure for destructive sprawl is to build cities people don't want to abandon, places where they can live healthy, fulfilling lives in densities that dont devour our landscapes, pave our wilderness and pollute our watersheds, air and wildlife. To achieve this, we need to invest in urban schools, transportation, parks, health care, police protection, and infrastructure that makes cities great magnets with gravity sufficient to draw back the creeping suburbs.

There is a moral as well as an environmental imperative to attend to landscapes that are home to so many. For more than 8 million New York City residents, the environment is not a Rocky Mountain meadow with pronghorns grazing beside an alpine stream. It's their transit system and office buildings, the parks where their children play.

No one understands this better than New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, 66, who has not only worked to make his city livable but has also promised to make it a global model of sustainability. Mayor Bloomberg realizes that a better future for New York will not be constructed on jobs or housing alone. It must also include cleaner air, safer drinking water, more green spaces and a healthy, accessible Hudson River.

In addition to protecting the local environment, he has promised to make New York a paradigm in the fight against global warming. His visionary PlaNYC commits New York to plant 1 million trees, slash greenhouse gases 30% by 2030 and achieve the cleanest air of any big city on the continent. Mayor Bloomberg has stepped into the breach left by a Federal Government that has abdicated all leadership on global warming. With his pragmatism and boundless energy, he has shown that a city can be both great and green. If that idea can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

Mehmet Oz

Professor Surgeon, a Turk descendant, and an America’s favourite doctor.

Once Eric Ripert, an executive chef and ceo of Le Bernardin, NY met him, he wouldn't have any idea who Mehmet was – a fact that even then put him in a minority. Mehmet, actually is a Columbia University heart surgeon, 47, who now has a series of best selling health books and Dr. Oz TV show with Oprah Winfrey, was already a famous face. As the chef talked with Mehmet, it became clear that he was intrigued by Mehmet's work in the hospital as Mehmet was by his in the kitchen of Le Bernardin. Once on an occasion, they agreed to try out each other’s job.

For two days, Ripert went to the OR with Mehmet, followed him on his rounds and even tried operating on a pig heart. He thought He did it well but later learned that if the heart had belonged to a human, the patient would have died. Mehmet did a lot better in his world than he did in his. Mehmet immediately took charge of his kitchen, was completely at ease leading his team of 40 cooks and even took time to greet guests. But it was not when Mehmet was interacting with diners and cooks that he learned the most about Mehmet; it was when Mehmet was interacting with patients. Ripert was impressed. According to him, Mehmet is a man of extraordinary compassion and strength, remarkably suited both to caring for his own patients and to carrying a message of health to a larger world.

Perhaps when you’ve had the powerful experience of opening human hearts, you find it a little easier to open your own.

references:
Columbia University Medical Center