April 2010

“Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?” That’s the question concerning Microsoft founder and now full-time philanthropist Bill Gates these days. He’s currently touring five universities nationwide to learn about research initiatives and deliver a speech on the value of service titled “Giving Back: Finding the Best Way to Make a Difference.” He spoke to a packed Kresge auditorium yesterday about two of the endeavors the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding: reducing the number of childhood deaths worldwide and improving the quality of teaching in the U.S. so fewer students drop out.

At MIT, his speech wasn’t so much a call to action—since, let’s face it, he’s preaching to the choir—as a reminder that sometimes the most urgent problems are those that are overlooked. Fewer than 100 scientists work on the malaria problem and, at least several years ago, when Gates became aware of the issue, only 10 scientists were focused on curing the common rotavirus, both extremely deadly in developing nations. “The world is not rational,” Gates lamented.

Indeed, he argued, the world would be a better place if people would find one or two big problems they feel passionate about and devote their time, talent, money, and/or political voice to them. Too much attention is paid to problems that concern the rich—like better investment strategies or curing baldness—when something as simple as better vaccines can have a significant impact on the world.

In 1960, said Gates, more than 20 million children under age five died. By 2009, that number had shrunk to under 9 million. What sparked the improvement? By far the biggest contributor was vaccines—those for measles and smallpox each saved more than 1 million lives. Yet, less than 1% of medical spending goes to vaccines. Consider another startling statistic. Of the people born the same year you were, how old will you be before 20% of them have died? If you live in the United States, you’ll be beyond 60 years old. In the poorest countries, you wouldn’t even be four.

Of course, problems won’t get solved without properly educated researchers. In the U.S., according to Gates, 30% of students drop out every year while 50% of minorities leave school. What’s more, the country doesn’t invest in educational research to learn what works best for students or give teachers much-needed feedback. Or to fully explore better educational uses of technology, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which Gates himself admits to benefitting from. “I’m a super happy user,” he said. “I retook physics with Professor Lewin” and also Professor Sadoway’s courses, among others—about a third of those on OCW offering videos, he said.

Currently, five school sites have received $400 million from Gate’s foundation and agreed to take part in surveys, teacher evaluations, video monitoring, and more to discover best practices. The trick with educational advancements, though, is getting nationwide acceptance. No group can uninvent a good vaccine, Gates said, but a well-organized group can take the country back to square one with regard to education innovation if new strategies aren’t employed.

And so the trick remains to not only engage the brightest minds but to encourage them to focus on the right problems. “We might delay that baldness drug by a few years,” he said, “but if it helps on the important problems, I think it’s a good thing.”

View the archived Webcast.

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