Engineers Without Borders

March 8, 2008
Prepared remarks by William H. Gates Sr., co-chair

Thank you, President Emmert.

When somebody told me there was an organization that started about eight years ago dedicated to a "world where all people have access to the knowledge and resources with which to meet their basic human needs," I said, "I know. I work at the Gates Foundation."

And when they said that organization is particularly focused on "sustainable, equitable, and economical engineering projects," I said, "You're right. One of our Guiding Principles is that 'science and technology have great potential to improve lives around the world.'"

So, you see, you engineers already know everything I could possibly tell you. I am preaching to the proverbial choir. But, since it is election season, let’s just say I've come here today to rally the base, to talk to you about how we at the foundation see technology improving people's lives all over the world.

And I am also excited to learn from you. The truth is, I am something of a Luddite. I don't even know how to use my Smart Phone! My son Bill and his wife Melinda are the real techies.

Bill has always been one. I remember way back when he was a teenager, he developed a sophisticated piece of equipment he called Traff-O-Data.

The Traff-O-Data was designed to make sense of the information generated by those little car-counting devices you've probably seen hundreds of times—a thin black hose stretched across a road.

The Traff-O-Data took the raw data from all those little black boxes and created a graph that gave you an hour-by-hour picture of each day's traffic flow.

It was a useful tool for anybody trying to make a decision about traffic routing, road construction, and so on.

After many successful kitchen-table practice sessions, my son convinced a couple of people from the City of Seattle to come to the house for a demonstration.

Well, things that day at the Gates home didn't go as planned.

The Traff-O-Data did not perform.

In the immediate wake of that first failure, Bill went running into the kitchen, shouting.

"Mother, mother...would you come out here and tell them that it worked?"

Happily, Bill persevered, and one or two of his subsequent ventures turned out better than Traff-O-Data.

Bill and Melinda spent their professional lives working in technology. They did it because they loved computers—and also because they believed in the power of innovation to make people’s lives better. But they saw that innovation doesn't make everyone's lives better—it leaves out those who can't afford it. So when they turned their attention to the foundation, it made sense that Bill and Melinda put science and technology at the heart of their philanthropy as well.

Their first big philanthropic project helped the country's public libraries, 11,000 of them, set up Internet connections. They believed that computers and connectivity were revolutionizing society, and they wanted to make sure the revolution reached everybody. Now, we work on helping libraries get wired in countries from the United States to Botswana, Chile, and Romania.

Science and technology have also been at the center of our global health work. A few years ago, Bill announced an initiative called Grand Challenges in Global Health. A partnership with three other organizations, Grand Challenges encourages scientists to work on breakthrough solutions to some of the most intractable health problems in the world.

The idea behind Grand Challenges was simple. The field of health suffered from a misallocation of resources. The biggest problems were getting the least attention. Diseases that killed millions of people were getting less funding than male pattern baldness.

Implicit in that analysis was a question: How much progress could we make if the sharpest minds started thinking seriously about solutions to those problems?

Many of the Grand Challenges projects are just ingenious. Let me tell you about one of my favorites, which opens a new front in the war against malaria.  Malaria kills 2,000 children every day. That's everybody in this room, times four, every day.

People get malaria from mosquitoes. So one of the Grand Challenges teams is focusing on the malaria vector, not the malaria parasite itself, to stop the mosquito from giving malaria to people.

Mosquitoes find people to bite by literally smelling them.

But what if you could confuse a mosquito’s sense of smell so it couldn't detect human beings? Or what if you could make a smell that is so appealing that mosquitoes bypass humans altogether and fly straight for traps?

The researchers on this project are experts on olfaction—on smell. They have identified about 60 genes located in a specific set of neurons that control the mosquitoes' human-seeking sense of smell. Now they are screening thousands of compounds to figure out which ones can stop the mosquitoes from doing what they want to do.

Can you imagine that? Mosquitoes are everywhere, and they're carrying malaria. They just don't infect you, because they don't bite you, because they don't know you're there!

One of the reasons I admire this project—besides the fact that it's just marvelous—is that the lead investigator, Dr. Richard Axel, is a Nobel Laureate whose life's work has nothing to do with the developing world. This is his first foray into the malaria field.

Dr. Axel, along with his previous collaborator Linda Buck (who is now at the Fred Hutch), won the Nobel Prize for a long series of studies about how people's sense of smell works. And now, because people like Dr. Axel and his current collaborator, Dr. Leslie Vosshall, can get funding to do research that will help the billions of poor people who live in the developing world—we can use expertise that already exists as a means to new and greater ends.

As exciting as Dr. Axel and Dr. Vosshall's work with mosquitoes is, I don't want to give the impression that science and technology can only be done by world-renowned experts in expensive laboratories.

There are great ideas everywhere, and not everyone has the resources to prove them before they get funded. That especially includes a lot of smart people in developing countries. So next Monday, March 31, we'll begin taking applications for a new initiative called Grand Challenges Explorations.

Over the next several years, we will make hundreds of small grants so people from all over the world with exciting ideas can get funding to see where they lead.  The bar to entry is low. In fact, the application is just two pages long. 

If a project gets selected, the researchers will get $100,000 of seed money to see if their idea has potential. If it does, follow-on grants of $1 million or more will be available.

If you have a great idea, I suggest that you get details from our Web site and see if your university will sponsor your project.

Science and technology doesn't mean the most complex solutions you can conjure up. Here again, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. It's a part of your vision, just as it's a part of ours, that technology doesn't work in the wrong context. You don’t start with technology. You start by finding out what people need, and then you see if technology can meet those needs in a better way.

That's why I'm so impressed with the way you go about your work. The chapter from the UW has a long-standing relationship with villagers in Bolivia. You work together—on the ground in Bolivia—to understand their day-to-day problems. And then you work together on solving them.

From my office at the Gates Foundation, I don't have the foggiest idea how to help Bolivian villagers. But when you visit Bolivia, spend time in people's homes, and feel the sting in your eyes from the stove fumes, you figure out pretty quickly that those fumes—and those stoves—are dangerous.

And then you know that the appropriate technology is the safe, clean burning stoves you have helped them install in their homes.

There are certainly times when, say, a huge water infrastructure project is warranted.

But there are also times when something much simpler, like a treadle pump, is what's called for. We have one at the office. It looks to me like a cross between a bicycle and a see-saw, but it can make the difference between destitution and prosperity for small farmers.

To make science and technology really work for the developing world, smart people like you have to think about how to apply your knowledge and your skills to the problems of billions of poor people.

As engineers, you have something very special to contribute. You can design stoves and build treadle pumps. But what is perhaps most special about you is that you aren't all that special.

The truth is, more and more people, engineers and doctors and everybody else, are starting to see a world without borders.

Call it the flat world. Call it the global century. Call it the international millennium. Some of the rhetoric can get a little grandiose. But what I have seen over the last decade is very real. It's the accumulation of individuals and small groups everywhere who are charged up about helping people who have been ignored for too long. Little by little, you are building a mass movement for global equality.

Let me tell you the story of one of those individuals, a friend of mine named Margrit Elliot. Margrit is a nurse from up the road in La Conner. Twice a year she organizes a team of doctors and nurses to travel to Bhutan, where they train local doctors, treat burn victims, and perform dozens of operations to repair cleft palates.

Margrit and her colleagues make these trips because they have adopted a new perspective—because they see what the future demands, not what the past forced us to regard as acceptable.

We used to say, "I will not tolerate cleft palates, or starvation, or polio in my country." So we got rid of cleft palates, starvation, and polio in the United States. Now people like Margrit—and groups like Engineers Without Borders—say, "I will not tolerate these things in my world. I will not tolerate a world with unsafe water. I will not tolerate a world in which deadly Chagas bugs colonize the roofs of a family’s home." Once we approach life from that perspective, nothing can be the same.

It doesn't mean everybody has to go to Bhutan right away. It doesn't mean you all have to devote your entire careers to solving the engineering problems of poor villages.

But it does mean that being a good engineer, or a good doctor, or a good parent, or a public-spirited citizen—now encompasses engagement with the whole wide world that surrounds us. That world must become, and it is becoming, a part of our consciousness. And I don't believe for a second that we can be conscious of suffering and still do nothing about it.

I am reminded of another mass movement for equality, this one within our borders: the civil rights movement. There are countless differences between that movement and this one, just as there are countless differences between Bolivia, and Zambia, and India, and every other country that we tend to lump together in the developing world.

But there is one similarity between what I see happening now and what I saw happening back in the 1960s that I want to highlight.

In both cases, injustices that had gone virtually unnoticed for years suddenly entered our consciousness. In the 1960s, Americans as one came to the conclusion that racial discrimination was fundamentally wrong, and we didn't want to live in a country that put the power of the law behind it. Now, we are coming to the conclusion that global inequity is fundamentally wrong. And we don't want to live in a world where 10 million poor people die from diseases we know how to prevent.

I lived in Seattle at the time, far away from the center of the movement, but people everywhere played their part. We made sure our politicians were on the right side of the issues. We talked about what was going on around the dinner table; our children studied the issues—and debated them—in school. We donated money to groups that were doing good work. We tried to address the many inequities that existed at home. And let me assure you that we did have segregated lunch counters here in Seattle.

And progress came quickly. As far as we have left to go, we have come a long, long way.

I see the same stirrings today. The same conviction that change matters. And that it's possible.

Let me close with this. I am an old man, a member of what they're now calling the Greatest Generation. But I have only just realized—toward the end of my life—how big my world is. That my world is not just my neighborhood, or my city, or my country. That the world I live in is actually as big as the world on a map.

You are young, and you already understand how big your world is!

In just eight years, your organization has grown exponentially. Your great generation has the energy to lead this movement, and euphoria is not too big a word to describe how it makes me feel. So all I can say to you now is thank you, and go to work.