Bill Gates nicks Larry Ellison's health center
Diseased one-upmanship
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The Bill Gates-Steve Jobs rivalry may have cooled, but the Microsoft Chairman is still going to toe-to-toe with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. A year after Ellison backed out of his promise to fund a multi-million dollar public health institute at Harvard University, Gates has revived the project at the University of Washington.
On Monday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would donate $105 million to the creation of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, "a new research center that will conduct independent, rigorous evaluations of health programs worldwide."
The institute will be run by Dr. Christopher Murray, the same health economist who was slated to run the ill-fated Harvard project.
Ellison promised Harvard what would have been its largest ever gift—$115 million—then backed out of the proposed health center last summer. In May, Murray left Harvard to join the new Global Health Department at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine.
"This generous grant from the Gates Foundation is a milestone for the University of Washington," said university president Mark Emmert in a joint announcement from the university and the foundation. "This is the largest private gift in UW’s history." ®
COMMENTS
Silly
Quote:
... all the misanthropes who feel that having a greater number of healthier human beings is "the last thing the planet needs" don't just top themselves and do Gaia a favour? Of course, they might feel slightly differently if their children were dying of entirely preventable diseases.
Endquote.
Hint: most of us don't have children. Because the last thing the world needs is more human beings.
-fred
Inevitable revolution
"The personal computer revolution would have happened ..."
Maybe, but not quite the way it did. It was the flakey coding of IBM PC software (notably the IBM BIOS and Flight Simulator) that was death for "MSDOS Compatible" systems. CP/M systems could innovate in hardware because the OS actually did its job, but on the PC, you had to be bug-for-bug compatible to sell at all. This led to the commoditization of the hardware, which led to prices dropping like a stunned pigeon.
We might have a lot neater computers today if the PC hadn't unfolded the way it did, but there would be fewer of them, and they'd be more expensive.
Mike
Maybe this sums it up somewhat
"I have 100 billion dollars... You realize I could spend 3 million
dollars a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I
don't make another dime. Tell you what-I'll buy your right arm for a
million dollars. I give you a million bucks, and I get to sever your
arm right here."
--Bill Gates
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