I'm a cardiologist. The greatest footballer who ever lived spent his childhood injecting hormones into his own legs every single night — because his body had stopped growing. This is the medical story behind Lionel Messi, and it's more extraordinary than most people realize.
At 11, Messi had barely grown since he was 9. He stood 4'4". Doctors diagnosed Growth Hormone Deficiency — his pituitary gland, the master gland at the base of the brain, wasn't producing enough growth hormone. Without treatment, specialists predicted he'd never pass 4'7".
The treatment: nightly injections of synthetic growth hormone into his thighs. A small boy giving himself shots while other kids played. The cost: around $1,500 a month — impossible for his family in Rosario for the long haul.
As a physician, let me tell you what those injections actually were.
Growth hormone is one of the most powerful signaling molecules in the human body. It drives bone growth, muscle development, and tissue repair. In a child whose pituitary can't make enough, replacing it isn't enhancement — it's rescue. Without it, Messi's growth plates would have fused early and he'd have lived his life severely short. With it, his body was given the raw material to become what his genetics intended.
This is the same class of medicine I've written about on this platform — replacing what the body can't produce. Insulin for diabetics. Thyroid hormone for hypothyroidism. And now, in the frontier I keep returning to, we're moving toward cell therapies that could one day let a body produce these molecules itself instead of injecting them nightly. Messi's childhood was the old model of that fight — a needle, every night, for years.
Then football history turned on a napkin. At 13, after a trial that stunned Barcelona, sporting director Carles Rexach grabbed the nearest paper he could find — a restaurant napkin — and wrote a promise: Barcelona would sign him and pay for his treatment. The family moved to Spain. The injections continued. He grew to 5'7".
And here's the part that gives me chills as a doctor.
The very thing that nearly ended his dream became the engine of his greatness. That low center of gravity — the short stature everyone once saw as a defect — became the source of the balance, the impossibly quick changes of direction, the dribbling no taller player could replicate. His body's limitation, medically corrected and then weaponized, turned into the most unguardable weapon in the sport's history.
Eight Ballon d'Ors. A World Cup in 2022. The completion of a story that, without a diagnosis, a treatment, and a napkin, almost never began.
I see the medical lesson in this constantly. A diagnosis is not a verdict. A body that seems to be failing you is not a sentence — it's a problem to be understood and, increasingly, solved. Messi's parents didn't accept "he'll never grow." They found the medicine. And Messi didn't accept "you're too small." He turned the smallness into genius.
Every night that boy pushed a needle into his leg wasn't a mark of weakness. It was proof of the discipline that would one day make him the greatest to ever play.
Modern medicine gave him the inches.
What he did with them was entirely his own.
Recién salgo del Área Industrial de Las Parejas, fui a buscar un pago, y pregunto en portería
-Donde va esa maquinaria? Me respondió:
-a Salta … y agregó: “desde que yo estoy acá (unos 23 años) creo que jamás se vendieron tantas sembradoras como este 2026”!!!
🇮🇱🇲🇽🇻🇪#URGENTE: Los rescatistas israelíes están mapeando en 3D rutas de acceso segura entre los escombros con drones IA de rastreo avanzado de la empresa de robótica israelí XTEND para que los topos de México puedan ingresar.
En el epicentro de la tragedia en La Guaira, Venezuela, una alianza poderosa está en acción:
Los rescatistas Israelíes con los drones tácticos XTEND (tecnología israelí de élite) y los legendarios “Topos” de la Ciudad de México trabajan juntos sin descanso.
Han laborado toda la noche y ahora preparan una operación crítica que podría salvar una o dos vidas atrapadas bajo toneladas de concreto.
Lo que están logrando en conjunto: Mapeo en 3D de rutas seguras entre los escombros.
Detección de signos de vida con IA, sensores térmicos e infrarrojos.
Guía precisa para que los Topos mexicanos ingresen a zonas de alto riesgo con mayor seguridad y velocidad.
El Israelí Roy Levy de XTEND lidera la operación de drones desde Venezuela. Esta unión entre la tecnología israelí más avanzada y la experiencia mexicana en rescates urbanos es un ejemplo de lo que se logra cuando dos naciones unen fuerzas por salvar vidas.
#Venezuela #Sismo #Terremoto
@nahueldubois Michel , hoy la madre de todas las batallas que viene desde el virreinato y llega hasta hoy es: proteccionismo de amigos vs libre mercado
@agarra_pala@JMilei Lo conocí ayer y me impactó su particular talento espontáneo y transgresor. No paro de reír con sus contenidos ! una pena su partida 🥲
The key to saving the environment is not looking backward, it’s moving forward.
I realized this the first time I visited Italy twenty years ago. Everything was clean and green. The rivers sparkled. The lesson for me was obvious: the answer is not underdevelopment. The answer is progress.
When China was poor, the air was so polluted that people could barely see the blue sky. Today, blue skies have returned to their cities. Development does not only create wealth, it also provides the resources needed to restore and protect the environment.
Some environmentalists want us to preserve every aspect of our biodiversity, including the mosquitoes for example, so that researchers can fly in once every ten years from their universities (which build particle accelerators and billion-dollar laboratories with their pocket money), study our ecosystems, and count how many people died from dengue outbreaks.
They want to buy our air through carbon credits. If carbon credits were such a great deal, they would be selling them to us, not the other way around.
Cleaning every river, lake, and water source in El Salvador, and ensuring they remain clean and sparkling, would cost roughly $12 billion. Where is that money supposed to come from without economic development? Carbon credits?
The path forward for our country is the path of Japan and Singapore, not the path of the Congo.
Elon Musk: There are no lords and peasants at Tesla. Everyone eats at the same table.
“I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line, I walked the line, I slept in the factory, and I worked beside them. So, I'm no stranger to them.
There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There are no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot.
At GM, there's a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla.
We give everyone stock options. Many people who are just working the line, who didn't even know what stocks were, we've made them millionaires.
And I just want to say that I'm incredibly appreciative of those who build the cars, and they know it.”
New York Times DealBook Summit, 2023