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Gates Against Malaria

Bill Gates has donated $168 million to malaria research. What does this say about the world's most analysed brain?

Gates: It's a new fever

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, was once asked what books he was reading. That, he told the interviewer, is enormously valuable information.

Indeed, there is a quasi-industry of sorts in operation with a singular objective: of figuring out what's going on inside Gates' head, and what it implies to the future of the world's most profitable business (read software, though you're welcome to interpret it in its widest sense), or maybe even the world.

In that context, what does the $168 million donation say about the man?

First, some facts. The money is being put in by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has already spent quite some money tackling AIDS in poverty-stricken countries. But this particular effort is Africa-centric. Gates was in rural Mozambique with his wife Melinda when he made the announcement. And he made it clear that this is about helping sub-Saharan Africa overcome one of its most debilitating diseases.

What to make of it?

The choice of disease in itself reveals a lot. For malaria is no ordinary disease. The tropical parasite that causes it is a very smart creature, capable of transforming itself into a new strain every time a drug is invented to bust it. Worse, since it afflicts mainly poor people concentrated in the tropics, the market-force-led war against it remains starved of both funds and top-end intelligence.

Now, few people in the world understand the ins and outs of the free market system - specially in areas of high intellectual input - better than the billionaire founder of Microsoft. Both software and pharma operate on an economic model that can loosely be described as delivering 'increasing returns to scale'. In the rule-book of this game, sales volumes are everything. The phenomenon of increasing returns privileges a super-hit formulation, as expressed in terms of raked-in dollars, over less catchy projects, thus causing a 'rush to the mean' by way of investment. So lots of money goes into the hunt for a 'blockbuster' drug (such as Viagra), but very little into a new drug to attack a virulent new form of malarial parasite. Just as lots of money goes into a new search engine in English, but very little into a search engine in, say, Swahili.

What that also means is that malaria is a problem that Gates' benevolence can make a major push towards solving. Not just that, there's an informational dimension to the effort as well; dissemination of the very knowledge of the disease's culprit, the malarial parasite, can save a lot of lives lost to misguided therapies.

Quite evidently, Gates is an impact player. It is not enough to be seen to be a do-gooder. He seems to be using his brain to actually see where his money will be used most effectively. Yes, the man seems to be optimizing his donations. A sharp business mind will always be a sharp business mind. The cynics may say what they want, but it's nice to have such a mind apply itself to problems that remain far from the rich world's consciousness. Many of the world's biggest information challenges remain inadequately addressed.

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