Michael Marmot

Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London and Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity. Chair of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, whose 2008 report Closing the Gap in a Generation established the current international vocabulary on health inequality, and author of the Marmot Reviews on health inequities in England.

Why he matters here

Marmot’s framework is what the physiological rights argument sits inside of, and also what it corrects. The social determinants tradition names the gradient and its causes; it does not, in the main, name the biology through which the gradient becomes disease. The resource’s contention is that the missing rung is a physiological one, and that a rights-based account of health cannot be complete without it.