Bill and Melinda Gates honored with Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award
Authors: Sarah Jackson
Journal: Journal of Clinical Investigation (2013)

The 2013 Lasker~Bloomberg Award for Public Service recognizes the extraordinary impact made by Bill and Melinda Gates toward improving global public health through the work of their foundation. Bill Gates made his fortune as one of the giants of the modern computer industry; today he and his wife Melinda may be equally well known for their worldwide work in philanthropy. Founded in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now the largest private foundation in the U.S. (1). The foundation has provided more than $26 billion in grant funding for all of its programs since inception and in recent years has invested nearly $2 billion annually for global health projects alone (2). What started as a simple desire to help those less fortunate blossomed into a bold organization, willing to take on seemingly insurmountable public health challenges. 

The concept behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began to take shape in the late nineties. Bill Gates recalled, “For my wife Melinda and me, the problem of global health inequity became visible fifteen years ago, when we saw a simple pie chart in the newspaper breaking down the major causes of death among children. One of the bigger slices of the pie, representing 500,000 dead children annually, was labeled: rotavirus. I had never heard of rotavirus. Melinda had never heard of it. It turns out it is the leading cause of diarrhea, preventable with a vaccine that only children in rich countries were getting. Our reaction was somewhere between disbelief and disgust. How could we not have seen even the barest outlines of this tragedy?”(3). This observation set in motion a new sense of urgency in Bill and Melinda Gates and started them on the ambitious path of trying to make a difference in public health and save lives. 

Bill and Melinda Gates (Figure ​(Figure1)1) may not have been public health experts at the time, but over the course of the next few years, they assembled a team of experts in science, medicine, and policy and undertook an initiative to address the biggest killers in the developing world. Dr. Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada, President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2006–2011, recently told the JCI, “Because of the sincerity of their commitment and the depth of their passion, Bill and Melinda really established not just a foundation but a new way of thinking about how to address inequities in health care.” Yamada credits the foundation for bringing the resources and partnerships needed to convert independent global health projects into coordinated efforts and accelerating implementation campaigns. Yamada said, “I think the Gates Foundation brought a sense of urgency, passion, and commitment that allowed the world to be more ambitious in a way, to solve some very difficult problems that seemed almost beyond solution. In addition, the Gates Foundation invested very substantially in research and development for new solutions to health care problems.” 



Figure 1

Bill and Melinda Gates, recipients of the 2013 Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award, on a recent trip to Bihar, India.