May 15, 2003 | Read Time: 1 minute
Bill Gates’s avid interest in biology has informed both his investment strategy and his philanthropy, says Business Week (May 5).
“My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases,” Mr. Gates told the magazine.
A voracious reader of books and articles about evolution and biology, he added: “I don’t think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren’t something I considered very important.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent more than $3.1-billion to improve basic health care in the developing world, supporting such things as childhood immunizations, research on an AIDS vaccine, and efforts to combat meningitis. Mr. Gates said his familiarity with the current state of biological research “lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.”
Mr. Gates invested several hundred million dollars in biotechnology companies in the 1990s, but said he is now focusing much of his interest in biology on his grant making.
