“I started to learn about poor countries and health, and got drawn in,” Bill Gates told students during a speaking tour this spring. “I saw the childhood death statistics. I said, ‘Boy, is this terrible!’”
He has a tendency to talk about the horrors and injustices of the developing world just as he talks about the computer business: in blunt, jerky sentences, his nasal voice flat or leaping, his manner without much natural warmth or charm. He sounds like a clever man in a hurry thinking out loud — which is exactly what he is. Starting in the late 1990s, he began to hungrily chew through the expert literature on global disease and nutrition and poverty.
“He is a giant sponge,” says an epidemiologist who specializes in HIV. “I had dinner with him a couple of weeks ago. The man is extraordinary. I’ve been in the field 15 years, and his grasp of the technical details is just astounding. His weird brain allows him to ask questions.”
This is part one of a two-part article. Part two will run tomorrow.
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