By Helen Branswell @HelenBranswell and Rick Berke @rickberke
June 17, 2016
Bill Gates became one of the richest men in history after cofounding Microsoft. His impact on the world of personal computing cannot be overstated.
But for more than 15 years, he has devoted himself to philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is passionate about combating health inequities and diseases of poverty in developing countries. He has played a key role in wrestling polio to the verge of extinction; another major global health scourge, malaria, is in his sights.
Gates, 60, is arguably Harvard’s most famous dropout, but he was back in Boston on Thursday to speak at the opening session of the American Society of Microbiology’s annual scientific conference, Microbe.
Before that event, Gates met at a downtown hotel with STAT executive editor Rick Berke and Helen Branswell, STAT’s senior infectious diseases and global health reporter. They discussed everything from Gates’s deep interest in science to his views of a presidential race in which the Republican nominee has suggested, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, that vaccines may be tied to autism.
The following is a condensed version of the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
We heard that you met with some scientists here to have some one-on-ones. We’re curious about your personal interest in science.
It’s a very fun part of my job. Last week, I met with people from the Wyss Institute and Synlogic. Today I met with Editas. I went to Intarcia.
I’m over at the Broad [Institute] a lot. And, you know, biology is moving at high speed, fortunately for Boston. It’s moving at slightly higher speed here than anywhere else. It’s incredible to see places like the Broad, the Wyss, and then all the companies that are here doing great work.
When you meet with these companies, do you ask them specific questions?
I read a lot of papers in advance. So take Editas as an example — Feng Zhang, David Liu. They’re there and they’re talking about the latest in CRISPR. They have some new endonucleases. We’re taking the diseases they’ve decided to target and understanding how they see the regulatory pathway.
It’s really nice that I get to meet with a lot of those top companies. Some of those people we’re doing grants with, some people we’re not. We’re just trying to understand the latest in the technology.
One thing that we hear a lot about is billionaires spending money to cure cancer. Is there almost too much money going to cancer and not enough to other public health issues?
Well, philanthropy, the beauty of it is its diversity. People get to give to things that they’re passionate about.
If people want to give to cancer, if that’s the thing they’ve seen an effect on, there are effective ways to do it.
Government research in the case of cancer — that’s the big number. I think NCI [the National Cancer Institute] is up at a little over $6 billion a year. But that doesn’t mean that somebody who is funding younger investigators or more unusual approaches — sometimes that really makes a huge difference.
What do you think of Vice President Biden’s “moonshot“?
Anything that gets us more money for medical research is a good thing. I don’t know about that construct specifically. There’s always a tendency in the slogans we use in health to potentially overpromise.
But people need to get excited. We had the war on cancer, you know cancer has won several rounds of that war …
What’s going on with cancer in general right now … it is a very, very exciting time in cancer — whether it’s immunotherapy, antibodies, basic molecular understandings.
You paused and almost rolled your eyes when I mentioned the “moonshot.” Do you think that that’s oversold?
The idea of getting people excited about the progress that is being made and can be made is a great thing. I’m always a little cautious about telling people what will necessarily come out of these things because the patience required is very, very high. The Siddhartha Mukherjee book [“The Emperor of All Maladies”] talks about how many times during the history of cancer people thought, okay, surgery, or we’ve got a chemist, or radiation — we’ve got it.
But this time, I think if you take a 20-year time frame, we will see some very, very dramatic reduction. And most diseases, including the infectious diseases that we focus on, there’s a lot to be optimistic about.
Source:
https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/17/bill-g...
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Thursday, June 23rd 2016 at 2:50PM
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