Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet.

He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986 and joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993.

Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture. He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.

In this episode of Medicine Unboxed VOICES, recorded before COVID-19, in a wide-ranging discussion Richard talks to Sam Guglani about his roots and formative experiences - and more recently his own illness - about the value of cooperative behaviour, about scientific publication, trust and politics, and the role of medicine as a global force for good.

In a statement that prefigures the current crisis Horton says: “Every successful species has been successful not because they have tried to compete with one another and tear each other apart, but because at profound moments of stress in their evolutionary history they have cooperated”.

Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Executive producers: Sam Guglani, Peter Thomas

Music: Butterfly Song by Jocelyn Pook, vocal by Melanie Pappenheim, from 'Untold Things', Real World Records, 2001. Permission courtesy of the composer. realworldrecords.com/releases/untold-things/