WP: Bill Gates's Vision, Energy and Capital Could Force Global Change

[DeepModem Mom]

Bill Gates's World of Possibility
Philanthropist's Vision, Energy and Capital Could Force Global Change
By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 21, 2006; Page D01


Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, administers a polio vaccine at a community health clinic in India in 2002. (By Jeff Christensen -- Associated Press)

Melinda Moree met plenty of naysayers who dismissed the prospects of a malaria vaccine. Then she encountered Bill Gates.

No one had developed a human vaccine against a parasite like malaria before, and the monetary incentives simply did not exist for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs targeted at poor children. Development would require cooperation among scientists, drug companies, health groups and international governments -- an alliance so large it didn't seem possible, she recalled someone telling Gates.

"Of course it is," Gates countered, according to Moree, now director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Seattle, which along with other groups has received nearly $500 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop, test, manufacture and eventually distribute a malarial vaccine. "There's something about vision and belief that these things are possible," Moree said.

People in the nonprofit world say Gates, 50, could fundamentally alter the methodology of philanthropy with his announcement last week that he will quit his day-to-day role at Microsoft Corp. in two years to spend more time on his foundation. He will take the same energy he once directed toward software technology to global health, education and other intractable issues, they say....

***

The co-founder of Microsoft has given $25.9 billion of his personal wealth to the foundation and has pledged to give billions of dollars more to devote to several dozen specific programs, such as minority scholarships, clean water initiatives, updated computer systems in libraries and the development of a variety of vaccines....The foundation has not been able to carry many of its projects through to completion because of the enormous logistical, political and commercial barriers inherent in distributing malarial vaccine to Africa, for example, and developing a vaccine against HIV and AIDS. Finishing those tasks requires political diplomacy, organizational efficiency, and monetary and human resources -- challenges that Gates may be uniquely positioned to take on as one of the most successful and driven businessmen of the era....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/20/AR2006062001366.html

[emulatorloo]

1. How much of Gate's giving results in better markets for Microsoft products

?

[ladjf]

2. True, if he is really that ethical and worried about the global

human condition. So far, I've seen nothing about his behavior that would lead me to believe he cares about anything but profit. We shall see.