Sanjay Gupta on Monday Mornings | Interview outtakes

Sanjay Gupta

Photo: CNN; Photo illustration: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay

In tonight’s pilot for TNT’s new series Monday Mornings, based on Sanjay Gupta’s novel of the same name, there’s a doctor whose colleagues dub 007—because he treats his patients as if he has a license to kill. I wondered if, in his own experience as a neurosurgeon, Gupta had ever encountered a 007. “When I was training,” he told me last month for the Time Out Interview, “an attending, when he was particularly upset with a resident, he’d call that resident 007. It’s a harsh thing, because you’re training to heal people and help people, and then this guy’s essentially calling you a paid assassin. It stuck with me.” Another outtake from my phone conversation with CNN’s medical correspondent:

You’ve reported on high-profile health-related issues around the world: the Iraq War, tsunamis, hurricanes. What does visiting other countries in crisis situations illuminate for you about health and medicine in the U.S. as compared to other parts of the world?

As a journalist who reports on these things all over the world, the health and medical stories are universally understood. If you’re covering a war in the Middle East, people may not understand the geopolitics of what’s happening between Israel and Lebanon, but they do understand when bombs have gone off and people have been injured and now they’re trying to get those people care. It illuminates what’s happening in a place in a way that I don’t think anything else can. As far as health care overall, when I was in Haiti after the earthquake—you know, I go to places that are some of the most resource-deprived places in the world. Before the earthquake, fewer than 50 percent of the people had access to clean water in Haiti. You see why clean water has to be the starting point in these places. You cannot think about establishing new drug formularies and getting in CAT scan machines and radio surgery until you can figure out distribution of clean water.

Monday Mornings premieres tonight on TNT at 9pm.