In 1992, ACT UP activists walked into the NIH demanding a seat at the table. By the time the NIH Revitalization Act passed, they had institutionalized something unprecedented: taxpayer oversight of taxpayer-funded research. Over two decades later, Mike Frick coordinated one of these boards and watched it work: researchers changed trial protocols because TB survivors told them to. But in 2025, that infrastructure collapsed in six months. This episode asks: when competence becomes power, what happens when the structures that protect us disappear?

If a globe shows a web of distances, then global health collapses these distances. The distance to there from here; from mystery to discovery; from injury to justice; from last century to next; from city to country; from you to me. Produced by the Center for Global Child Health Research, ONE future is an audio documentary series that pulls the listener into this network, one investigator at a time. From nutrition as a global health intervention to the still developing history of childhood TB. From Cape Town, South Africa to Papua, New Guinea to Lima, Peru.From Portland, Oregon—this is ONE future. Created by Andrew Stout. Executive producer: Lynne Swarbrick. Center Co-Directors: David Lewinsohn & Deborah Lewinsohn.

Mike Frick joined Treatment Action Group in 2013 without a single day of tuberculosis expertise. What he brought instead was a willingness to learn the science. He found the policy levers. And when Pharma giant Sanofi charged over $100 per treatment course for a drug the US government had funded, Mike and TAG asked a simple question: what does it take to get a pharmaceutical company to listen to people without PhDs or MBAs?

Malaria is one of the earliest diseases recorded in medical literature, first described in the writings of Hippocrates, around six thousand years ago. In this episode of ONE future, Dr. Brandon Wilder discusses a new approach to malaria that, if successful, could achieve game-changing outcomes equal to curing childhood cancer year-after-year.

Dr. Wilder is a member of the Center for Global Child Health Research—as well as Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at OHSU in Portland, Oregon.