world's most brilliant scientists & Bill Gates
Better Bananas, Nicer Mosquitoes
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
SEATTLE - Addressing 275 of the world's most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke:
"I've been applying my imagination to the synergies of this," he said. "We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold."
They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world's richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.
Their deadly serious proposals - answers to the Grand Challenges in Global Health that Mr. Gates posed in a 2003 speech in Davos, Switzerland - sounded much like his spoofs: laboratories around the world, some of them led by Nobel Prize winners, proposing to invent bananas and sorghum that make their own vitamin A; chemicals that render mosquitoes unable to smell humans; drugs that hunt down tuberculosis germs in people who do not even know they are infected; and vaccines that are mixed into spores or plastics or sugars and can be delivered in glasses of orange juice or modified goose calls.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
SEATTLE - Addressing 275 of the world's most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke:
"I've been applying my imagination to the synergies of this," he said. "We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold."
They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world's richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.
Their deadly serious proposals - answers to the Grand Challenges in Global Health that Mr. Gates posed in a 2003 speech in Davos, Switzerland - sounded much like his spoofs: laboratories around the world, some of them led by Nobel Prize winners, proposing to invent bananas and sorghum that make their own vitamin A; chemicals that render mosquitoes unable to smell humans; drugs that hunt down tuberculosis germs in people who do not even know they are infected; and vaccines that are mixed into spores or plastics or sugars and can be delivered in glasses of orange juice or modified goose calls.
posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 8:01 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home