Ten weeks and counting.
That's how long Bill Gates has until July 1, when he will officially end his role as chairman at Microsoft, the company he co-founded more than 30 years ago, and turn his attention to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And if a recent speech reveals anything about what that turn means, it's this: The folks at the Gates Foundation better get used to having a very curious Bill around, full-time.
Gates was speaking in Seattle Monday afternoon at the Institute for Systems Biology, an innovative independent research group founded by genetics pioneer Leroy Hood.
Gates' remarks were fairly rote -- noting the power of technology to "improve lives and save lives," the ever-increasing power of data storage and computation, and reviewing several projects at Microsoft that combine computation and biology.
But in the Q&A session following his remarks, Gates also offered a hint of his post-retirement plans, when he will, as he put it, "transition full time" to the Gates Foundation. "I'll spend more time with scientists. I'll get out in the field more," he said. Lucky scientists.
He also pointed to one specific problem that he'd like to take a shot at: getting pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for the infectious diseases that plague billions of people in the developing world. The track record is horrible, and familiar. While billions of dollars have yielded treatments for baldness and erectile dysfunction, Gates said, there's comparatively little on the shelf for malaria, tuberculosis or HIV.
Even the treatments that do pop up are more dumb luck than dedication. The anti-worm treatments that have proven so effective for humans against Guinea worm, for instance, were only developed because Americans and other first-worlders wanted a way to keep their dogs worm-free.
"Luckily it worked for humans, too," Gates noted.
The core problem seemed to intrigue Gates, who offered it as "a paradox": If a drug company ever invents a treatment for something like malaria, it'd be immediately beset by calls to give the drug away. "So they choose never to work in those areas," he noted sympathetically. "The current incentive system isn’t doing it."
One thing Gates won't be leaving behind in retirement is his distaste for open source software. After one scientist asked if Gates would consider open source uses in health research, the man who built his $280 billion company on the power of intellectual property bristled.
"There's free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."
Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."
