I wasn’t always a boring newsroom-bound editor. Back in my days as a Time magazine foreign correspondent, I used to fly to far-flung places, recorder and notebook in hand. That’s how, in the summer of 2005, I found myself in Mae Sot, a small city in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, tasked with contributing to a major cover package the magazine was producing on heroes of global health.

I was there to visit a rural medical clinic largely run by and for refugees from Myanmar’s military government. The patients were overwhelmingly there for one reason: malaria. While southeast Asia had made significant progress against the disease, malaria was still highly active in Mae Sot. I saw rows and rows of feverish patients laying motionless in their net-covered beds. And then, when I got back t

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