The quiet American who has saved 6 million lives
WHAT is a hero? Not a big man with a gun; not any more. But a billionaire software mogul sounds almost equally unlikely. You probably missed it, all eyes being on the carnage in Paris, but Bill Gates has found a new way to help save the world: by drinking water made from human poo.
The Microsoft founder is backing the development of a new kind of low-cost sewage treatment plant, ideal for use in developing countries.
The Omni Processor, devel- oped by the Seattle company Janicki Bioenergy, works by heating excrement to produce water vapour, which is then passed through a purification system to create safe drinking water. The remaining solids, meanwhile, are used as fuel to generate electricity.
Gates is prepared to put his mouth where his money is. He posted a video on his blog this week, showing him nervously sampling the end product of the Omni Processor. “It’s water!” he declares, with evident relief.
Gates has, by most estimates, saved more than six million lives. Since 1994, when he and his wife started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they have given away $30.2-billion — about 37% of their net worth — most of it on global health initiatives.
The Gateses intend to give away 95% of their wealth by the time they die.
That doesn’t mean they’ll end up starving in a garret — or indeed in their $150-million home in Washington State — but it’s some awesome philanthropy nonetheless. They appear to belong to that rarest of breeds: plutocrats who truly understand the value of money.
A couple of years ago, I watched Gates deliver a lecture about the work of his Foundation. The richest person in the world appeared at the podium looking, as he always does, like a downtrodden accounts clerk. He was wearing ordinary rimless glasses and an ill-fitting suit from the bargain rail. His haircut appeared to have been selfinflicted, with nail scissors.
The speech he gave was as self-effacing as his fashion sense. He talked about his determination to eliminate polio worldwide — wipe it out completely, forever — but he kept swivelling the spotlight back on to the people doing the difficult grunt work.
He talked about the Rotarian do-gooders who leave their cosy lives in Britain to deliver polio vaccinations all over the world; the Indian health workers who, in 2007, walked for miles through waist-high floods to vaccinate children in rural Bihar; and the vaccinators — about 60 to date — murdered in Pakistan by militants who believe they are part of a wicked Western plot to sterilise Muslims. (As a result of which, polio cases in Pakistan are soaring.)
And he talked about the virologists and epidemiologists whose long hours in the lab have saved more lives than anyone can begin to count.
“In the year I was born, more than 20 million children under the age of five died. Last year, that number was 6.9 million,” he pointed out.
There are times when it feels that the bad guys really are winning. But the truth is, they’re just better at getting into our heads.
If you tot up the numbers, it’s the people fighting for life and hope who are winning — the doctors, the aid workers, the decent politicians, the philanthropists. “True heroism,” said Arthur Ashe, “is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost.”
I have no idea whether Gates is a good person in private. Perhaps he is rude to waiters, or hogs the remote control. We all have our dark side.
But he’s a hero all right — and all the better for being a modest one.