I’ve been giving speeches about vaccines for 25 years. After so much time, it could have become routine for me. But it never has.

One reason is that the impact of vaccines—a single dose can protect a child from deadly diseases forever—is like a miracle to me, and who gets tired of talking about miracles?

The other reason is tied to this particular moment. There’s never been a point in the past 25 years when more lives hung in the balance. In all likelihood, 2025 will be the first year since the turn of the century when the number of children dying will go up instead of down. 

Why? Governments are cutting health aid—including funds for Gavi, the vaccine organization that the Gates Foundation helped start. As a result, Gavi will likely not have all the money it needs to fund its next five years of work. 

So when I spoke this week at a summit in Brussels where donors committed a new round of funding for Gavi, I focused on why it’s so important to keep the money flowing and maintain our momentum on vaccines. You can read my remarks below.

Remarks as delivered
June 25, 2025
Global Summit: Health & Prosperity through Immunisation
Brussels, Belgium

Good evening, and thank you to everyone joining us here tonight—and for all your support for one of the most transformative efforts in the world.

I want to particularly thank President von der Leyen and President Costa, and the European Union, for co-hosting this summit. President von der Leyen has long been an incredible champion for health and development, and the EU has been one of the Gavi's biggest supporters since the very beginning—support that's more crucial now than ever.

This chart is one that I think about a lot. It's really my most favorite chart. And I consider it almost kind of a report card for humanity. Because over the last 25 years, the reduction of under-five deaths has been far faster than any time in history. We've gone from over 9 million to now half as many deaths taking place by children. This is an unbelievable result.

And it doesn't fully state the benefit of these vaccines. The vaccines leave a lot of kids far more healthy, and so their ability to achieve their potential is increased.

Gavi prioritizes saving lives, and it's done with incredible scientific rigor. We're constantly improving vaccines. We're constantly looking at the safety, and I'm very proud of the work that's done to make sure that these vaccines are incredibly safe.

The founding of Gavi actually goes back to about the time the Gates Foundation was first started. And after 25 years, I can still say that it's at the top of the list of things that I'm very, very proud of. At that time, kids were not getting access to vaccines. They were too expensive. They hadn't been formulated properly. And I was stunned to learn that so many kids were dying from a disease like rotavirus because the vaccine wasn't getting out to all the children of the world.

So Gavi was created to not only help finance vaccines, but work with countries to adopt these new vaccines.

We've done an amazing job of getting these prices down. A good example is the pneumococcal vaccine, PCV. This vaccine became available in high-income countries the year that Gavi was founded. And it does a fantastic job of protecting kids against pneumonia, which was the single most deadly childhood infection. But it was very expensive.

And so Gavi and its partners incentivized vaccine manufacturers to develop a new, much cheaper PCV, which was introduced in 2017. Today, the manufacturers make PCV vaccines available to low-and middle-income countries for just $2 a dose.

And of course, we've seen similar reductions across all of the different vaccines, allowing us to add new vaccines to save even more children.

Since the founding of Gavi, the overall cost of fully vaccinating a child has been cut in more than half.

And we have a pipeline of new vaccines coming along, vaccines to address new diseases and that bring down costs even further.

A good example of this is the HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer, which HPV prevents, is the fourth most common cancer in women around the world. And this vaccine can prevent over 90% of these cases.

But countries were slow to adopt this vaccine, in part because it was hard to deliver: initially, it required three doses spread across six months.

Scientists believed that perhaps it could be done with fewer doses. And so the Gates Foundation funded a trial to see whether a single dose was essentially fully protective. And after seeing the incredible results, the WHO approved a single dose schedule in 2022.

Now, we have 75 countries around the world that have moved to this single dose approach.

And because the single dose is cheaper and easier to deliver, it's now getting to far more girls around the world. For example, after Nigeria introduced the single-dose vaccine, it was able to vaccinate more than 12 million girls in less than a year. That's really incredible.

Across Gavi countries, HPV vaccine coverage has increased dramatically. The year after this single-dose approval, we doubled the number of girls getting the vaccine. And [the next year] we doubled it again, and this year we'll double it again.

There's more than just making vaccines available. We have to work with our partner countries on helping improve their health systems. So the Gavi Alliance has spent a lot of its resources and a lot of its technical support in helping improve those primary health care systems, which are so vital. We've helped countries understand where they're missing kids and how to invest in raising those coverage levels.

As you've heard, over this 25-year period, that means over a billion children have been vaccinated—resulting in the saving of over 19 million lives.

Nineteen million is a big number. It's almost easier to understand if I just say: okay, here's a child whose life was saved. But you have to take your reaction to how valuable that is and multiply it by this absolutely gigantic number.

The total cost to save those lives was about $22 billion. And that means that Gavi saved children's lives for only about $1,000 per life saved.

And in addition, the kids who these vaccines have kept healthy not only go to school; they do well in school. They join the economy. They contribute to their country. And really, this is why improving health through vaccines is part of the formula for helping countries be self-sufficient.

Gavi's vaccination has generated $250 billion in economic benefits in the countries it supports. In fact, Gavi has had such an extraordinary economic benefit that over 19 countries that were Gavi recipients have now graduated, meaning they now fully fund their own immunization programs.

A great example is Indonesia. Since partnering with Gavi, it’s doubled the number of vaccines offered through its routine immunization program—and it’s seen childhood deaths fall to a quarter of what they were before. And now, Indonesia is not only transitioning to be fully self-supportive—it’s also become a Gavi donor.

Of course, this is a challenging time. All the progress we’ve made is at risk. Budgets are tight, and we all have to show our priorities when there’s tough trade-offs to be made.

There’s no denying: this is a global health crisis. Between the U.S. cuts and other funding cuts, in total, aid in total has gone down by 30 billion this year alone. It reinforces the incredible values being shown by the people who are showing up here today and being incredibly generous.

But with the cut in health resources, along with the financial situation a lot of these low-income countries are in, we are going to have a few years where things will go backwards.

As we think about this, think of a mother who will bring a baby wheezing for breath to a help center, and because the vaccines aren't available, that baby will not survive.

Think of a health worker trying to deal with a measles outbreak who, because there's less resources for that primary health care system or vaccines, that measles epidemic will continue.

This is agonizing. I mean, we have to put ourselves in the position of the parents who lose these children and how tough it must be for them to realize that the life could have been saved by a vaccine that costs just 30 cents.

So though our trend lines will briefly go into reverse, I believe that we can come back. I believe that we will resume that incredible progress that you saw.

I don't know if it'll be in two years or four years or six years, but I do know that as we bring these resources back, and we take advantage of an incredible pipeline of innovation, new drugs, new vaccines—lots of amazing things to help with these diseases—we will resume progress.

So everyone here, I'd say, is recommitting themselves, just like the Gates Foundation, to doubling down and staying committed.

You know, I'm not pessimistic. In fact, we have things like polio eradication that we are, as we say, this close to elimination. That'll be a mind-blowing thing. Likewise, malaria: we have tools, a variety of tools that brought together will give us a chance in the next 20 years to completely eradicate that as a disease, just like we're doing with polio.

This is all why the Gates Foundation is pledging $1. 6 billion to Gavi for this next five-year period. Thank you.

And it's why we'll invest billions in making sure that pipeline of new and lower-cost vaccines continues to make Gavi even more effective.

In closing, I think we can reflect on what Nelson Mandela once said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children.”

In the last 25 years, Gavi has helped over a billion children live better, healthier lives—thanks to the extraordinary support of partners like you.

If we get this right, this trajectory of progress will continue for decades to come.

Thank you.

I’ve been working in global health for 25 years—that’s as long as I was the CEO of Microsoft. At this point, I know as much about improving health in poor countries as I do about software. 

I’ve spent a quarter-century building teams of experts at the Gates Foundation and visiting low-income countries to see the work. I’ve funded studies about the effectiveness of health aid and pored over the results. I’ve met people who were on the brink of dying of AIDS until American-funded medicines brought them back. And I’ve met heroic health workers and government leaders who made the best possible use of this aid: They saved lives. 

The more I’ve learned, the more committed I’ve become. I believe so strongly in the value of global health that I’m dedicating the rest of my life to it, as well as most of the $200 billion the foundation will give away over the next 20 years.  

People in global health argue about a lot of things, but here’s one thing everyone agrees on: Health aid saves lives. It has helped cut the number of children who die each year by more than half since 2000. The number used to be more than 9 million a year; now it’s fewer than 5 million. That’s incontrovertible.  

So when the United States and other governments suddenly cut their aid budgets the way they've been doing, I know for a fact that more children will die. We’re already seeing the tragic impact of reductions in aid, and we know the number of deaths will continue to rise.

A study in the Lancet looked at the cumulative impact of reductions in American aid. It found that, by 2040, 8 million more children will die before their fifth birthday. To give some context for 8 million: That's how many children live in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined. 

I’ve submitted written testimony on this topic, which you can read below, for the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing occurring later today. In it, I discuss what’s already happened and what needs to happen next.

Testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations
June 25, 2025

Over the past 25 years—the same span of time I spent leading Microsoft—I have immersed myself in global health: building knowledge, deepening expertise, and working to save lives from deadly diseases and preventable causes. During that time, I have built teams of world-class scientists and public health experts at the Gates Foundation, studied health systems across continents, and worked in close partnership with national and local leaders to strengthen the delivery of lifesaving care. I have visited hundreds of clinics, listened to frontline health workers, and spoken with people who rely on these programs. Earlier this month, I traveled to Ethiopia and Nigeria, where I witnessed firsthand the impact that recent disruptions to U.S. global health funding are having on lives and communities.

Global health aid saves lives. And when that aid is withdrawn—abruptly and without a plan—lives are lost.

Yet, in recent months, some have questioned whether the foreign assistance pause has caused harm. Concerns about the human impact of these disruptions have been dismissed as overstated. Some people have even claimed that no one is dying as a result.

I wish that were true. But it is not.

It is important to note that while this hearing is about the Trump Administration’s $9 billion recission package, what is really at stake is tens of billions of dollars in critical aid and health research that has been frozen by DOGE with complete disregard for the Congress and its Constitutional power of the purse.

In the early weeks of implementing the foreign aid freeze, DOGE directives resulted in the dismissal of nearly all United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staff and many personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Some funding was later restored to allow for the continuation of what has been categorized as "lifesaving" programs. However, to date that designation has been applied narrowly and with limited transparency, in an inconsistent manner, often prioritizing emergency interventions when a patient is already in critical condition over essential preventative or supportive care.

For example, providing a child with a preventive antimalarial treatment, ensuring access to nutrition so that HIV/AIDS medications can be properly administered, testing pregnant women for HIV to see if they are eligible for treatment to prevent transmission to their children or identifying and treating tuberculosis cases early have not consistently qualified for exemption. As a result, many of the programs delivering these services have been suspended, delayed, or scaled back.

Recent reporting from the New York Times has shed light on the devastating human cost of the abrupt aid cuts. One especially tragic example is Peter Donde, a 10-year-old orphan in South Sudan, born with HIV, who died in February after losing his access to life-saving medication when USAID operations were suspended. His story is one of many.

During my recent visit to Nigeria, I met with leaders from local nonprofit organizations previously funded by the United States. One group shared the remarkable progress they had made in tuberculosis detection and treatment. In just a few years, case identification increased from 25 percent to 80 percent, a critical step toward breaking transmission and reducing the overall disease burden. That progress has now stalled. The grants that enabled this work were tied to USAID staff who have been dismissed, and with their departure, the funding ended, and the work stopped.

The broader effects of these sudden shifts are difficult to overstate. For example, funding for polio eradication has been preserved in the State Department budget but cut from the CDC—even though the two agencies collaborate closely on the program. This type of fragmented decision-making has left implementing organizations uncertain about staffing and operations. Many no longer feel confident that promised U.S. funds will materialize, even when awards have been announced. In some cases, staff continue to work without pay. Some organizations are approaching insolvency.

Meanwhile, in warehouses across the globe, food aid and medical supplies sourced from American producers are sitting idle—spoiling or approaching expiration—because the systems that once distributed them have been disrupted. Clinics are closing. Health workers are being laid off. HIV/AIDS patients are missing critical doses of medication. Malaria prevention campaigns, including bed net distributions and indoor spraying, have been delayed or canceled, leaving hundreds of millions of people unprotected at the peak of transmission season.

Efforts to track data that would illustrate the severity of this worsening crisis have also been severely compromised. Many of the people responsible for collecting and reporting health information—health workers, statisticians, and program managers—have been laid off or placed on leave. The systems that once monitored health outcomes are shutting down, and the offices where that data was once analyzed now sit empty. As a result, the true scope of the harm is becoming harder to measure, just as the need for information is most urgent.

The situation we face is not about political ideology, and it is not a debate over fiscal responsibility. U.S. government spending on global health accounts for just 0.2 percent of the federal budget. Shutting down USAID did nothing to reduce the deficit. In fact, the deficit has grown in the months since.

Furthermore, many of the allegations regarding waste, fraud, and abuse have proven to be unsubstantiated. For example, the widely circulated claim that USAID sent millions of dollars’ worth of condoms to the Gaza Strip is inaccurate. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that the program allocated approximately $27,000 for condoms as part of an HIV transmission prevention initiative—not in the Middle East, but in Gaza Province, Mozambique.

What we are witnessing because of the rapid dismantling of America’s global health infrastructure is a preventable, human-caused humanitarian crisis—one that is growing more severe by the day. DOGE made a deadly mistake by cutting health aid and laying off so many people. But it is not too late to undo some of the damage.

A Record of Progress—and What is at Risk

Since 2000, child mortality worldwide has been cut in half. Deaths from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria have declined significantly. And we are on the verge of eradicating only the second human disease in history: polio. These are not abstract statistics; they represent tens of millions of lives saved. None of this progress would have been possible without consistent, bipartisan U.S. leadership and investment.

Over the past several decades, the United States has built one of its most strategic global assets: a respected and robust public health presence. This leadership is not just a humanitarian achievement—it is a core pillar of American soft power and security. For example, a Stanford study analyzing 258 global surveys across 45 countries found that U.S. health aid is strongly linked to improved public opinion of the United States. In countries and years where U.S. health aid was highest, the probability of people having a very favorable view of the United States was 19 percentage points higher. Other forms of aid—like military or governance—did not have the same effect. Another example is the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The rapid deployment of U.S. scientists, health workers, and CDC teams helped contain the virus before it could spread globally. Their presence allowed the U.S. to help shape the response strategy, speed up containment, and prevent a wider outbreak. Many African countries are facing the dual burden of rising debt and pressing health needs, forcing painful choices between repaying creditors, and protecting their citizens. Helping them navigate this challenge is not just the right thing to do—it is a strategic imperative. If the United States retreats, others will fill the gap, and not all of them will bring our values, our priorities, or our interests to the table. Preserving American global influence will require restoring the staff, systems, and resources that underpin it—before the damage becomes irreversible.

I understand the fiscal pressures facing Congress. I recognize the need to prioritize spending and to hold programs accountable for results. I also share the Trump Administration’s commitment to promoting efficiency and encouraging country-led solutions. But I believe those goals can—and must—be pursued while still protecting the programs that deliver the highest return on investment and the greatest impact on human lives.

The United States’ support for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) represent some of the smartest, most effective investments our country has ever made. These initiatives are proven, strategically aligned with American interests, and cost-effective on a scale few other government programs can match.

Together, Gavi and the Global Fund have helped save more than 82 million lives. Gavi has helped halve childhood deaths in the world’s poorest countries and returns an estimated $54 for every $1 invested. The Global Fund has contributed to a 61% reduction in deaths from HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. PEPFAR has saved over 26 million lives and helped millions of children be born HIV-free. GPEI has brought us closer than ever to the eradication of polio. Pulling back now would not only jeopardize these historic gains—it would invite a resurgence of preventable disease, deepen global instability, and undermine decades of bipartisan American leadership.

This is not a forever funding stream for the U.S. Government. These programs set out clear pathways for countries to “graduate” from aid, which many have already done. For example, nineteen countries, including Viet Nam and Indonesia, have successfully graduated from Gavi support and now fully finance their own immunization programs. Others—from Bangladesh to Cote d'Ivoire—are on track to do the same. This is how U.S. development policy should work: catalytic, cost effective, and designed to help countries become self-reliant and drive their own progress. I agree that aid funding should have an end date, but not overnight. The most effective path to that end date is innovation. By investing in the development and delivery of new medical tools and treatments, we can drive down the cost of care, and in some cases, make diseases that were once a death sentence treatable, or even curable. Advances in therapies for chronic conditions like sickle cell disease, HIV, or certain types of cancers could transform lives and health systems. American innovation offers a sustainable exit strategy—one that reduces long-term costs, allows the United States to responsibly step back, and builds lasting trust and good will that far exceed the original investment.

Over the past 25 years, the Gates Foundation has invested nearly $16 billion in global health partnerships like Gavi, the Global Fund, and GPEI. We will continue to invest, through innovation, research, and close coordination with partners. But no private institution—or coalition of them—can replace the scale, reach, or authority of the U.S. government in delivering lifesaving impact at the global level.

The decisions made in the coming weeks will shape not only the lives saved in the near term—but the legacy of American leadership for generations to come.

Download a PDF of the testimony with appendices that include reflections from Gates Foundation staff in Africa on the impact of the U.S. aid cuts; analytical projections from respected organizations; and a selection of first-hand reporting from reputable news organizations and journalists.

When I first began thinking about how to give away my wealth, I did what I always do when I start a new project: I read a lot of books. I read books about great philanthropists and their foundations to inform my decisions about how exactly to give back. And I read books about global health to help me better understand the problems I wanted to solve.

One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today.

In the essay’s most famous line, Carnegie argues that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” I have spent a lot of time thinking about that quote lately. People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.

That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned. I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world. And on December 31, 2045, the foundation will close its doors permanently.

This is a change from our original plans. When Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation in 2000, we included a clause in the foundation’s very first charter: The organization would sunset several decades after our deaths. A few years ago, I began to rethink that approach. More recently, with the input from our board, I now believe we can achieve the foundation’s goals on a shorter timeline, especially if we double down on key investments and provide more certainty to our partners.

During the first 25 years of the Gates Foundation—powered in part by the generosity of Warren Buffett—we gave away more than $100 billion. Over the next two decades, we will double our giving. The exact amount will depend on the markets and inflation, but I expect the foundation will spend more than $200 billion between now and 2045. This figure includes the balance of the endowment and my future contributions. 

This decision comes at a moment of reflection for me. In addition to celebrating the foundation’s 25^th anniversary, this year also marks several other milestones: It would have been the year my dad, who helped me start the foundation, turned 100; Microsoft is turning 50; and I turn 70 in October.

This means that I have officially reached an age when many people are retired. While I respect anyone’s decision to spend their days playing pickleball, that life isn’t quite for me—at least not full time. I’m lucky to wake up every day energized to go to work. And I look forward to filling my days with strategy reviews, meetings with partners, and learning trips for as long as I can.

The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities. I am excited to see how our next chapter continues to move the world closer to a future where everyone everywhere has the chance to live a healthy and productive life.

Planning for the next 20 years

I am deeply proud of what we have accomplished in our first 25 years.

We were central to the creation of Gavi and the Global Fund, both of which transformed the way the world procures and delivers lifesaving tools like vaccines and anti-retrovirals. Together, these two groups have saved more than 80 million lives so far. Along with Rotary International, we have been a key partner in reviving the effort to eradicate polio. We supported the creation of a new vaccine for rotavirus that has helped reduce the number of children who die from diarrhea each year by 75 percent. Every step of the way, we brought together other foundations, non-profits, governments, multilateral agencies, and the private sector as partners to solve big problems—as we will continue to do for the next twenty years.

Over the next twenty years, the Gates Foundation will aim to save and improve as many lives as possible. By accelerating our giving, my hope is we can put the world on a path to ending preventable deaths of moms and babies and lifting millions of people out of poverty. I believe we can leave the next generation better off and better prepared to fight the next set of challenges.

The work of making the world better is and always has been a group effort. I am proud of everything the foundation accomplished during its first 25 years, but I also know that none of it would have been possible without fantastic partners.

Progress depends on so many people around the globe: Brilliant scientists who discover new breakthroughs. Private companies that step up to develop life-saving tools and medicines. Other philanthropists whose generosity fuels progress. Healthcare workers who make sure innovations get to the people who need them. Governments, nonprofits, and multilateral organizations that build new systems to bring solutions to scale. Each part plays an essential role in driving the world forward, and it is an honor to support their efforts.

Of course, although the Gates Foundation is by far the most significant piece of my giving, it is not the only way I give back. I have invested considerable time and money into both energy innovation and Alzheimer’s R&D. Today’s announcement does not change my approach to those areas.

Expanding access to affordable energy is essential to building a future where every person can both survive and thrive. The bulk of my spending in this area is through Breakthrough Energy, which invests in companies with promising ideas to generate more energy while reducing emissions. I also started a company called TerraPower to bring safe, clean, next-generation nuclear technology to life. Both of these ventures will earn profits if successful, and I will reinvest any money I make through them back in the foundation, as I already do today.

I support a number of efforts to fight Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias. Alzheimer’s is a growing crisis here in the United States, and as life expectancies go up, it threatens to become a massive burden to both families and healthcare systems around the world. Fortunately, scientists are currently making amazing progress to slow and even stop the progress of this disease. I expect to keep supporting their efforts as long as it’s necessary.

The success in both areas will determine exactly how much money is given to the foundation since any profits they earn will be part of my overall gift.

What the Gates Foundation hopes to accomplish

Over the next twenty years, the foundation will work together with our partners to make as much progress towards our vision of a more equitable world as possible.

The truth is, there have never been more opportunities to help people live healthier, more prosperous lives. Advances in technology are happening faster than ever, especially with artificial intelligence on the rise. Even with all the challenges that the world faces, I’m optimistic about our ability to make progress—because each breakthrough is yet another chance to make someone’s life better.

Over the next twenty years, the foundation’s funding will be guided by three key aspirations:

In 1990, 12 million children under the age of 5 died. By 2019, that number had fallen to 5 million. I believe the world possesses the knowledge to cut that figure in half again and get even closer to ending all preventable child deaths.

We now understand the essential role nutrition—and especially the gut microbiome—plays in not only helping kids survive but thrive. We’ve made huge advances in maternal health, making sure that new and expectant mothers have the support they need to deliver healthy babies. We have new, life-saving vaccines and medicines, and we know how to get them to the people who need them most thanks to organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund. The innovation is there, the ability to measure progress is stronger than ever, and the world has the tools it needs to put all children on a good path.

Today, the list of human diseases the world has eradicated has just one entry: smallpox. Within the next couple years, I expect to add polio and Guinea worm to the list. (When we eradicate the latter, it will be a testament to the late President Jimmy Carter’s leadership.) I’m optimistic that, by the time the foundation shuts down, we can also add malaria and measles. Malaria is particularly tricky, but we’ve got lots of new tools in the pipeline, including ways of reducing mosquito populations. That is probably the key tool that, as it gets perfected and approved and rolled out, gives us a chance to eradicate malaria.

In 2000, the year that we started the foundation, 1.8 million people died from HIV/AIDS. By 2023, advances in treatment and preventatives cut that number to 630,000. I believe that figure will be reduced dramatically in the decades ahead, thanks to incredible new innovations in the pipeline—including a single-shot gene therapy that could reduce the amount of virus in your body so much that it effectively cures you. This would be massively beneficial to anybody who has HIV, including in the rich world. The same technology is also being used to treat sickle cell disease, an excruciating and deadly illness.

We’re also making huge progress on tuberculosis, which still kills more people than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. Last year, a historic phase 3 trial began that could be the first new TB vaccine in over 100 years.

The key to maximizing the impacts of these innovations will be lowering their costs to make them affordable everywhere, and I expect the Gates Foundation will play a big role in making that happen. Health inequities are the reason the Gates Foundation exists. And the true test of our success will be whether we can ensure these life-saving interventions reach the people who need them most—particularly in Africa, South Asia, and across the Global South.  

To reach their full potential, people need access to opportunity. That’s why our foundation focuses on more than just health.  

Education is key. Frustratingly, progress in education is less dramatic than in health—there is no vaccine to improve the school system—but improving education remains our foundation’s top priority in the United States. Our focus is on helping public schools ensure that all students can get ahead—especially those who typically face the greatest barriers, including Black and Latino students, and children from low-income backgrounds. At the K-12 level, that means boosting math instruction and ensuring teachers have the training and support they need—including access to new AI tools that allow them to focus on what matters most in the classroom. Given the importance of a post-secondary degree or credential for success nowadays, we’re funding initiatives to increase graduation rates, too. 

As I mentioned, having access to a high-quality nutrition source is key to keeping kids’ development on track. Smallholder farmers form the backbones of local economies and food supplies, and they play a key role in making that happen. One of the main ways the foundation helps farmers is through the development of new, more resilient seeds that yield more crops even under difficult conditions. This work is even more important in a warming world, since no one suffers more from climate change than farmers who live near the equator. Despite that, I’m hopeful that we can help make smallholder farmers more productive than ever over the next two decades. Some of the crops our partners are developing even contain more nutrients—a win-win for both climate adaptation and preventing malnutrition.

We’ll also continue supporting digital public infrastructure, so more people have access to the financial and social services that foster inclusive economies and open, competitive markets. And we’ll continue supporting new uses of artificial intelligence, which can accelerate the quality and reach of services from health to education to agriculture.

Underpinning all our work—on health, agriculture, education, and beyond—is a focus on gender equality. Half the world’s smallholder farmers are women, and women stand to gain the most when they have access to education, health care, and financial services. Left to their own devices, systems often leave women behind. But done right, they can help women lift up their families and their communities.   

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and other countries around the world are cutting their aid budgets by tens of billions of dollars. And no philanthropic organization—even one the size of the Gates Foundation—can make up the gulf in funding that’s emerging right now. The reality is, we will not eradicate polio without funding from the United States.

While it's been amazing to see African governments step up, it’s still not enough, especially at a moment when many African countries are spending so much money servicing their debts that they cannot invest in the health of their own people—a vicious cycle that makes economic growth impossible.

It's unclear whether the world’s richest countries will continue to stand up for its poorest people. But the one thing we can guarantee is that, in all of our work, the Gates Foundation will support efforts to help people and countries pull themselves out of poverty. There are just too many opportunities to lift people up for us not to take them.

The last chapter of my career

Next week, I will participate in the foundation’s annual employee meeting, which is always one of my favorite days of the year. Although it’s been many years since I left Microsoft, I am still a CEO at heart, and I don’t make any decisions about my money without considering the impact. 

I feel confident putting the remainder of my wealth into the Gates Foundation, because I know how brilliant and dedicated the people responsible for using that money are—and I can’t wait to celebrate them.

I'm inspired by my colleagues at the foundation, many of whom have foregone more lucrative careers in the private sector to use their talents for the greater good. They possess what Andrew Carnegie called “precious generosity,” and the world is better off for it.

I am lucky to have been surrounded by many generous people throughout my life. As I wrote in my memoir Source Code, my parents were my first and biggest influences. My mom introduced me to the idea of giving back. She was a big believer in the idea of “to whom much is given much is expected,” and she taught me that I was just a steward of any wealth I gained.

Dad was a giant in every sense of the word, and he, more than anyone else, shaped the values of the foundation as its first leader. He was collaborative, judicious, and serious about learning—three qualities that shape our approach to everything we do. Every year, the most important internal recognition we hand out is called the Bill Sr. Award, which goes to the staff member who most exemplifies the values that he stood for. Everything we have accomplished—and will accomplish—is a testament to his vision of a better world.

As an adult, one of my biggest influences has been Warren Buffett, who remains the ultimate model of generosity. He was the first one who introduced me to the idea of giving everything away, and he’s been incredibly generous to the foundation over the decades. Chuck Feeney remains a big hero of mine, and his philosophy of “giving while living” has shaped how I think about philanthropy.

I hope other wealthy people consider how much they can accelerate progress for the world’s poorest if they increased the pace and scale of their giving, because it is such a profoundly impactful way to give back to society. I feel fulfilled every day I go to work at the foundation. It forces me to learn new things, and I get to work with incredible people out in the field who really understand how to maximize the impact of new tools.

Today’s announcement almost certainly marks the beginning of the last chapter of my career, and I’m okay with that. I have come a long way since I was just a kid starting a software company with my friend from middle school. As Microsoft turns 50 years old, it feels right that I celebrate the milestone by committing to give away the resources I earned through the company.

A lot can happen over the course of twenty years. I want to make sure the world moves forward during that time. The clock starts now—and I can’t wait to make the most of it.

In a rural health clinic, a baby tries to take her first breath.

But her lungs aren’t ready. Because she was born too early, they haven’t developed the slick, soap-like substance that keeps her air sacs from collapsing. Without that substance—called lung surfactant—breathing becomes a desperate, exhausting act.

She’s suffering from respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS, a life-threatening condition that appears within hours of birth in premature babies. Unless she gets treatment, her oxygen levels will plummet and her organs will begin to shut down. In one study from India, every baby born with RDS outside of a hospital setting died. In Ethiopia and Nigeria, RDS is responsible for almost half of all neonatal deaths.

At hospitals in higher-income countries, there’s a way to save her: a liquid form of organically-derived surfactant delivered directly into the lungs. But the procedure requires a highly-trained specialist to guide a breathing tube down the newborn’s windpipe—avoiding the stomach and placing it just right—at a cost of up to $20,000. In many parts of the world, that kind of care simply doesn’t exist.

But what if any healthcare worker anywhere in the world could simply hold a small nebulizer to the baby's face and deliver surfactant as an easy-to-administer inhalant?

This breakthrough—a synthetic surfactant that’s stable enough to be delivered through a nebulizer—is still in development, drive in part by Gates Foundation-supported research at Virginia Commonwealth University, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and The Lundquist Institute. But its promise is extraordinary: an RDS treatment that costs less to make, doesn’t require a specialist to administer, and eliminates the need for intubation.

In other words, a therapy currently limited to the most advanced hospitals could become accessible in rural clinics and community settings around the world. Even in places with top-tier care, it could make treatment gentler, faster, and easier to deliver. In the United States—where RDS still affects 24,000 newborns a year—it could reduce the risks that come with intubating babies who might weigh only two or three pounds.

It’s the kind of innovation that could help solve one of the most persistent problems in global health: delivering intensive care without an intensive care unit, and helping millions more babies survive their first, most fragile moments.

Since 1990, the mortality rate for children under five has been cut by more than half—an amazing mark of global progress. But another statistic hasn’t fallen as fast: the number of babies who die in their first month of life.

Each year, 2.3 million newborns don’t survive past their first 28 days. And the day a baby is born is the most dangerous day of their life. The single biggest cause of these deaths is prematurity. Nearly 900,000 babies a year die from complications related to being born too soon, including infection, underdeveloped organs, and RDS.

Lower cost, easier-to-deliver surfactant is one way to give newborns a fighting chance, but it’s not the only way. Around the world, simple, affordable interventions already exist to identify at-risk pregnancies earlier, prevent more preterm births, and ensure a healthy birthing experience for mothers. Not only are these tools designed to work in the hardest-to-reach places—many of them start working even before a baby takes that first breath.

One of these innovations is a new type of ultrasound that’s changing who can catch the risks of preterm birth—and where.

Around the world, two thirds of women never get an ultrasound screening during pregnancy. Traditional machines are bulky and expensive, with specialized training required to operate them and interpret their results. In places where medical resources are already stretched thin, these types of ultrasounds are rarely an option.

But now, we have ultrasound devices about the size of a phone that can be operated by a nurse or midwife—no on-site specialist required. They weigh less than a pound. They process scans instantly. Their AI interface automatically detects high-risk conditions, like a shortened cervix or signs of early labor, so patients are referred for further care. And they have built-in telehealth functions to share images with remote specialists when needed.

By finding and flagging risks early, these AI-enabled ultrasounds are giving healthcare workers more time to act. In some cases, that means transferring the mother to a higher-level facility. In others, it means providing her with antenatal steroids—an inexpensive, underused treatment that speeds up fetal lung development—and, when needed, medications that delay labor just long enough for those steroids to take effect.

Early warning is essential, but we can save even more lives by going further upstream, starting with the health of pregnant women themselves.

In many low-income countries, undernutrition isn’t an exception. It’s the norm. And the intense demands of pregnancy make nutritional deficiencies even worse—putting mothers at increased risk of complications or death in childbirth, and raising the odds of early labor, low birth weight, and developmental delays for their babies.

But there’s a surprisingly simple fix: a daily supplement called MMS, or multiple-micronutrient supplementation, developed by the United Nations. It contains 15 essential vitamins and minerals for pregnancy—like zinc to reduce the risk of early labor, folic acid to help prevent birth defects, iron and vitamin D for healthy birth weight, and iodine for brain development. For an entire pregnancy, it costs just $2.60.

If MMS became the standard prenatal supplement in every low- and middle-income country, it could save nearly half a million newborn lives each year—and prevent serious complications in 25 million births by 2040.

The innovations above focus on treating, detecting, and preventing premature birth, a huge threat to newborn survival. But one of the most powerful ways to protect babies, preterm or full-term, is by ensuring their mothers stay healthy through pregnancy and childbirth.

When a woman dies during delivery, her baby is 46 times more likely to die in that first month of life. That’s why any serious effort to tackle infant mortality must also address postpartum hemorrhage—which tragically kills 70,000 women a year and is the leading cause of maternal mortality. Fortunately, two innovations are already helping healthcare workers catch and treat it before it becomes fatal.

The first is a calibrated drape—a simple plastic sheet placed under a woman during delivery that collects blood and shows, through printed measurement lines, exactly how much she’s losing. It gives healthcare workers a fast, accurate way to spot dangerous bleeding before it becomes life-threatening. The second is a one-time, 15-minute iron infusion during pregnancy that treats severe anemia—so if a woman does hemorrhage during childbirth, she’s less likely to experience catastrophic blood loss and more likely to survive.

Neither of these tools is complicated or expensive. But in combination, they can make a life-or-death difference for mothers and the babies who depend on them.

Taken together, these innovations form a chain of survival. They help mothers stay healthy through pregnancy. They detect problems before they become emergencies. They give fragile newborns a fighting chance. And they make it possible for families to celebrate a baby’s birth rather than mourning a loss.

Some of these tools are already saving lives. Others are on the verge of doing so. But their impact will be limited unless we prioritize and fund their delivery, not just their development. The world needs to make sure these innovations don’t get stuck in labs or warehouses—so they can reach the mothers and babies who need them most.

We started the Gates Foundation 25 years ago to save and improve children’s lives. But no one can solve a problem they don’t fully understand. And back in 2000, the world’s understanding of childhood mortality was occasionally inaccurate, often imprecise, and almost always incomplete.

That’s why I believe the breakthrough that transformed our foundation in the two-and-a-half decades since wasn’t a single vaccine or treatment—it was a revolution in the world’s understanding of childhood mortality. Through advances in how researchers collect and analyze global health data, we now know much more about what kills children, where these deaths occur, and why some kids are more vulnerable than others. By putting those insights to work, we’ve been able to save lives.

The first challenge was knowing exactly what was killing children.

Reading the 1993 World Development Report opened my eyes to the scale of the problem: Around 12 million children under the age of five were dying every year, with a staggering disparity between rich and poor countries. But the available data was fragmented and inconsistent. That made it difficult to understand trends or allocate resources effectively.

So the foundation helped create the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, to give a permanent home to the Global Burden of Disease study—originally developed in the 1990s by researchers at Harvard University and the World Health Organization. We wanted to expand it from a static snapshot of the problem into a regularly updated tool that tracked how diseases impact people around the world. That gave us something the world never had before: a comprehensive—and current—picture of child mortality across every country.

Measuring symptom-based causes of children’s deaths was an important step. But broad disease categories like “diarrhea” or “respiratory infection” didn’t give us enough information to act on. We needed to know which specific pathogens were responsible for the most common and fatal cases. So the Gates Foundation funded two landmark studies to find out.

In 2013, the Global Enteric Multicenter Study, or GEMS, found that rotavirus was causing 20 percent of lethal diarrhea cases in kids. At the time, diarrhea was the second-leading infectious killer of children. While oral rehydration therapy had already helped bring down deaths over previous decades, GEMS helped fast-track the rollout of a more targeted tool—a new rotavirus vaccine—in the hardest-hit countries, in close partnership with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

A year later, the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health study, or PERCH, revealed that respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, was a much more common cause of severe pneumonia—the leading infectious killer of kids around the world—than previously understood. (And not just in low- and middle-income countries, where 97 percent of RSV deaths occur, but in higher-income ones too, where the virus still fills pediatric hospital wards each winter.) That prompted us to expand our investments in RSV prevention, which led to the approval of the first maternal vaccines for RSV in 2023.

But understanding what causes childhood mortality wasn’t enough on its own, because deaths aren’t distributed evenly across countries—or even within them. That’s why our second challenge was to figure out where exactly children were dying.

At the time, most health data was collected at national or regional levels. That masked major differences in disease burden from one community to the next—and made it harder to target interventions effectively.

To solve this second challenge, the foundation invested in new approaches to health mapping that combined satellite imagery, GIS technology, GPS data, and local health surveys. These maps gave Ministries of Health and implementing partners unprecedented, anonymized detail about disease patterns and population distribution, down to individual neighborhoods, that transformed how and where public health resources are deployed—while still preserving the privacy of the individual children and families in these places.

In Pakistan—one of just two countries where wild polio remains endemic—advanced mapping tools have helped vaccination teams reach and protect kids in settlements that weren’t on any official maps. Across sub-Saharan Africa, better geographic data has transformed the fight against malaria by revealing that transmission often clusters in small, hyper-local pockets. Through the Malaria Atlas Project, countries like Nigeria can now track those patterns more precisely—and then get bed nets, testing, and treatment where they’ll have the greatest impact.

With better knowledge of what was killing children, and where, one more fundamental question remained: Why might one child die from a disease while another—who lives in the same place, faces the same risks, and gets the same treatment—survives? This was our third big challenge.

In theory, traditional autopsies would provide the answer. But in the places where most childhood deaths still occur, these invasive procedures are often impossible to perform—too costly, and sometimes opposed for religious, cultural, or personal reasons.

So in 2015, the foundation launched the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance network, or CHAMPS, which now operates in nine countries across Africa and South Asia. Working with in-country partners, CHAMPS pioneered a new autopsy alternative—using minimally invasive tissue sampling—that can determine causes of death quickly and accurately while respecting local customs and beliefs.

Through CHAMPS, we discovered that childhood deaths rarely have a single cause. Instead, kids often have multiple conditions at the same time, with malnutrition frequently leaving them much more vulnerable to a whole host of infections. (While it rarely shows up on death certificates, it’s an underlying cause of death in nearly half of all child mortality cases.) That finding helped solidify nutrition as a core focus of the foundation’s global health work—and the research, innovation, and product development we invest in. On the ground, we’re supporting partners as they integrate nutrition screening into routine care and train healthcare workers to manage multiple risks at once.

CHAMPS also demonstrated that inadequate prenatal care is responsible for a majority of stillbirths, newborn deaths, and maternal deaths, prompting us to further expand access to maternal health services—like prenatal vitamins and AI-enabled ultrasounds—in the communities where we work.

But the biggest takeaway from CHAMPS is also the most hopeful—and a reminder of why we started the Gates Foundation in the first place: So many childhood deaths could be prevented with existing interventions. We just need to ensure they reach the right children at the right time.

Twenty-five years in, our work on child mortality is far from complete. Still, the impact of what we have learned has been enormous

The Global Burden of Disease, GEMS, and PERCH studies helped shift global priorities by showing the world what was really killing kids—and where new vaccines and treatments could make the biggest difference. Better geospatial tools have empowered countries to pinpoint disease hotspots, find previously unmapped settlements, and distribute life-saving resources where they’re needed most. And CHAMPS is giving governments better data on why children are dying—data that’s now shaping policies, improving reporting, and guiding more effective care.

Most importantly, even as the number of children born every year has gone up, the number of overall childhood deaths has fallen by more than half—from 11.3 million in 1990 to 4.5 million in 2022. Playing a part in making that happen is the best job I’ve ever had, and the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.

At the Gates Foundation, we used to say we could cut child mortality in half again by 2040. The truth, though, is that goal feels further out of reach now—not because the science has stalled, but because support for global health has. The progress we’ve been part of was only possible because governments around the world, including here in the U.S., made long-term commitments to saving lives and followed through. That kind of leadership gave millions of children who would have died a chance at life—and made life better for millions more. 

The last 25 years have shown us what’s possible. The next 25 will depend on whether the world keeps showing up for the children who need it most.

I was scrolling Reddit recently when I saw a video of a mosquito trying and failing to suck someone’s blood. Some of the replies were pretty funny, but I noticed that most of them were just some form of “How do I get this person’s superpower?” It was a great reminder of how universally hated these bloodsuckers are.

But I have good news—for Reddit users and everyone else: Real progress has been made in the fight against mosquitoes and specifically against malaria, the deadliest disease they carry. And I believe we’ll soon have the transformational tools needed to end malaria entirely.

Eradication is a goal Melinda and I set back in 2007, when we stood before a group of global health leaders and called for something many considered impossible: wiping malaria out completely from every country. And until that happened, our goal was—and is—to save as many lives as possible by maximizing the impact of the tools we already have. Eradicating the disease wasn't a new idea; the World Health Organization had made a similar declaration back in 1955. But that earlier campaign, while successful in many wealthier parts of the world, had fallen short across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Despite half a century of effort, malaria was still infecting up to half a billion people—and claiming a million lives—annually.

Today, the landscape has changed dramatically. In 2022—the last year we have data on—there were 249 million cases worldwide and 608,000 deaths. Those are staggering numbers, but they’re also improvements from where the world was back in 2007. Since then, 17 additional countries have been declared malaria-free by the World Health Organization. Outside of Africa, deaths from the disease have mostly been eliminated.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to the World’s Fair in Seattle. It was amazing to see all these fantastic technologies that felt like something out of a science fiction novel. I asked them to take me back multiple times during the six months it was open here, and I remember walking away from the fairgrounds each time feeling that I had just caught a glimpse of the future.

That feeling came back to me recently as I walked out of a classroom in Newark, New Jersey.

In May, I had the chance to visit the First Avenue Elementary School, where they’re pioneering the use of AI education in the classroom. The Newark School District is piloting Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor and teacher support tool, and I couldn’t wait to see it for myself.

I’ve written a lot about Khanmigo on this blog. It was developed by Khan Academy, a terrific partner of the Gates Foundation. And I think Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, is a visionary when it comes to harnessing the power of technology to help kids learn. (You can read my review of his new book, Brave New Words, here.)

We’re still in the early days of using AI in classrooms, but what I saw in Newark showed me the incredible potential of the technology.

I was blown away by how creatively the teachers were using the tools. Leticia Colon, an eighth-grade algebra teacher, explained how she used AI to create problem sets about hometown heroes the students might be interested in. In February, Khanmigo helped her develop equations that incorporated Newark boxer Shakur Stevenson’s workout routines, so her students could practice math skills while learning about a real-world role model.

Cheryl Drakeford, a third-grade math and science teacher, talked about how she uses Khanmigo to help create rubrics and lesson hooks for assignments. The technology gives her a first draft, which she then tailors for her students. For example, the AI once gave her a hook that used a generic story about a fruit stand, and she edited it to be about Pokémon cards and Roblox—two topics her students are passionate about. “Khanmigo gives me the blueprint, but I have to give the delivery,” she said.

Several of the teachers I met with showed me how they can access each student’s dashboard and get a summary of how they’re doing in a particular subject. They loved being able to easily and quickly track a student’s progress, because it’s saving them a lot of time. They were also excited about how their students are using Khanmigo as a personalized tutor.

This technology is far from perfect at this point. Although the students I met loved using Khanmigo overall, they also mentioned that it struggled to pronounce Hispanic names and complained that its only voice option is male—which makes it clear how much thought must still be put into making the technology inclusive and engaging for all students. In an ideal world, the AI would know what the students in Ms. Drakeford’s class are into, so she wouldn’t have to do any editing. And Ms. Colon told me it took her several tries to get Khanmigo to give her what she wanted.

In other words, my visit to Newark showed me where we are starting from with AI in the classroom, not where the technology will end up eventually. It reinforced my belief that AI will be a total game-changer for both teachers and students once the technology matures. Even today, when the teachers at First Avenue delegate routine tasks to AI assistants, they reclaim time for what matters most: connecting with students, sparking curiosity, and making sure every child feels seen and supported—especially those who need a little extra help.

Khanmigo is just one of many AI-powered education tools in the pipeline, and the Gates Foundation is focused on ensuring these tools reach and support all students, not just a few. Our goal is that they help level the playing field, not widen existing gaps. We’re currently working with educators across the country to get feedback and make the technology more responsive to their needs. Visits like the one I took to Newark are part of that process. It was fantastic to learn what teachers were enthused about and see how different students are engaging with AI.

The educators I met in Newark are true pioneers. Some were on the cutting edge, constantly looking for new ways to use AI in their classroom. Others were using it in a more limited fashion. I was impressed by how the school was able to support each teacher’s comfort level with the technology. They’re putting a lot of thought into change management and making sure that no educator is forced to try things that won’t work in their classroom.  

That’s because, at the end of the day, teachers know best. If you hand them the right tools, they will always find a way to support their students. My visit to Newark left me more optimistic than ever that AI will help teachers do what they do best and free them up to focus on what matters most.

When I was in high school, one of my favorite classes was drama. A teacher pushed me to sign up, and I was fully prepared to hate it—but I fell in love with acting. Drama pushed me to broaden myself, try something new, and see if I could succeed. I even gained enough confidence to audition for—and get—the lead in “Black Comedy,” the school play my senior year.

Blaire Penry, the 2024 Washington State Teacher of the Year, understands how transformative a class like drama can be, because she’s seen it happen with her own students. And I was blown away by how she uses technology to reimagine how students engage in the classroom.

Blaire teaches career and technical education, or CTE, and fine arts in the Auburn School District, which is located about 30 miles south of Seattle. Over the years, she has taught a wide range of electives—including marketing, worksite learning, career choices, and psychology, in addition to drama—to both middle and high school students.

What really sets Blaire apart, though, is her approach to online education. When schools switched to remote instruction in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blaire quickly realized that the existing curriculum didn’t work. It just wasn’t engaging enough without the face-to-face interaction. At the time, her school district was doing fully synchronous instruction. Teachers did live instruction, students could ask questions, and classes operated on the same schedule as before. Still, her students struggled to connect with the material from their homes.

So, she helped develop a new curriculum that worked in an online setting and innovated new techniques to keep her students engaged.

Blaire created new materials and lesson plans that resonated more with Auburn students, 76 percent of whom are people of color—including a new social justice curriculum aimed at helping her kids become more active and informed citizens. Homeroom became a structured social period where students could get to know their teacher and each other, since the normal opportunities to connect—over lunch, or in the hallway between classes—aren’t available in online instruction. The chat function was used constantly throughout her classes, with Blaire checking in to make sure students were engaged and the kids asking (and answering!) questions about the material.

“It gave me this moment to dismantle my curriculum and build it back up with my community in mind, which is such a gift,” Blaire told me. “I found that creative challenge incredibly fulfilling, and it gave me a chance to, I think, become a better teacher.”

The work that Blaire and her colleagues did was eventually spun off into Auburn Online School. Although schools reopened in Washington in 2021 and many students returned in-person, a lot of students in her district continued to opt for remote instruction. Many of them lived in intergenerational households, with older family members who were at risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19. Auburn Online gave them a safe, high-quality option for continuing their education.

The Gates Foundation supported a lot of schools that offered this kind of support during the pandemic, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that some students continued to learn remotely to keep their loved ones safe. But what stunned me was how many kids wanted to stick with online instruction for reasons that had nothing to do with the pandemic.

Although many students struggled with the transition to online learning and lack of face-to-face interaction with their teachers and peers, Blaire found that a number of her kids not only adapted but thrived. Some needed extra flexibility so they could work a job or keep up with other responsibilities. Others benefited from having greater control of their learning environments. For example, they could focus much better in the comparative quiet of their own homes, or they had less anxiety when they could answer a question in a chat rather than by raising their hands in front of the whole class.

It blew my mind to learn that fully remote instruction works better for some students. Like many people, I’ve always thought of it as a necessary obstacle to overcome in times of necessity. But Blaire sees it as a tremendous opportunity for some families—and as a powerful tool for driving equity.

I was especially fascinated to hear how she teaches drama. I didn’t think it was a class that would lend itself well to online instruction, but Blaire convinced me otherwise.

“One of the things that is really fun about teaching drama online is that it gives students the space to explore and try things out in ways they might not with all eyes on them in a classroom,” she told me. For example, Blaire sets her students up in breakout rooms, where they can practice in small groups or with her. When it comes time to perform a monologue, they record it—and if they don’t like their performance, they just try it again until they have a version they’re comfortable with other people seeing.

“Some of my students might not have taken a drama class,” she says. “But when you release some of that immediate pressure of performing, you give them permission to be creative in ways they haven’t explored before.”

Blaire is clear that online education isn’t the right fit for everyone. But she’s a firm believer that families deserve it as an option.

Because she is such a big thinker about how technology can help students, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask her what she thinks about AI. Blaire is excited about how AI tools will help her better track her students’ progress and provide them with personalized tutors—two use cases I recently saw firsthand in Newark, NJ.

She hopes that teachers are given adequate training on using AI, especially given the biases it can reinforce. Blaire told me about a technology showcase she recently attended. The facilitator was showing off how AI can help teachers save time and asked it to put together a top ten list of recommended reading material for middle schoolers. Every author on the list was white, and almost all of them were men.

This is a solvable problem. AI can be programmed to be more representative and thoughtful in its answers—but it’s going to require input from brilliant teachers like Blaire, who understand the potential and limits of technology in the classroom.

“Online learning creates an opportunity for teachers to be a little bit fearless,” Blaire says. “It’s an opportunity to examine your students, examine your community, and then put it in the forefront of how you’re going to move forward. It’s exciting to try something new, be innovative, and disrupt the norm.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Father’s Day without my dad never gets easier. Although he is on my mind every day, I always find myself thinking about him even more often this time of year.

My dad was a giant in every sense of the word. More than anyone else, he shaped the values of the Gates Foundation, and everything we have accomplished is a testament to his vision of a better world. Sadly, we lost my dad five years ago to Alzheimer’s disease. It was a brutal experience, watching my brilliant, loving father go downhill and disappear.

In the years since his passing, I’ve met far too many people who had similar experiences with their own loved ones. More than 7 million people in the United States are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease. That means about 1 out of every 9 people over the age of 65 have it. As life expectancies continue to go up, those numbers will only increase.

But here’s the good news: We are making massive progress in the fight against Alzheimer’s and other related dementias.

I saw some of the reasons for optimism firsthand during a visit to Indiana last year. I met with the team at Indiana University’s School of Medicine in Indianapolis—where they have an incredible center that is doing lots of leading-edge neuroscience—and took a super cool tour of their biomarker labs. I also got the opportunity to look under the hood of new automated machines that will soon be running diagnostics around the world. It’s an exciting time in a challenging space.

During my visit, I learned more about the latest big breakthrough in Alzheimer’s R&D: blood-based diagnostic tests. A number of different companies have approaches in the pipeline, but each of them works in roughly the same way by detecting the ratio of amyloid plaques in the brain. I’m optimistic that these tests will be a gamechanger. Here in the U.S., this work reached a huge milestone last month: The FDA approved the first blood-based test for patients 55 years and older.

Until recently, the only way to confirm a suspected Alzheimer’s diagnosis was to get either a PET scan or a spinal tap. Neither were the kind of test a doctor would order unless you were showing clear signs of decline. But catching Alzheimer’s early is key. We now know that the disease begins 15-20 years before you start to see any signs. A simple, accurate, and easy-to-run blood test might one day make routine screening possible, identifying patients long before they experience cognitive decline.

When I talk to people about the promise of these new diagnostics, I’m often asked, “What is the point of getting diagnosed if I can’t do anything about it?”

It’s a fair question—but soon it will be moot. The FDA has approved two drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s. Both have proven to modestly slow down the progression of the disease, but what I’m really excited about is their potential when paired with an early diagnostic. My main takeaway from my visit to Indiana is that these treatments could be drastically more impactful than I initially thought when given early in the disease’s progression.

Phase III clinical trials are underway now to prove just how transformative these drugs are for people with presymptomatic Alzheimer’s, and we could see results as soon as 2026. Until then, the drugs will continue to help patients who are already showing cognitive decline.

I’m also optimistic that researchers will continue to improve current treatments and develop new drugs. This will require running lots of clinical trials. Without a simple diagnostic test, it is often difficult to find enough eligible patients. In some cases, it takes even longer to enroll participants—as long as three years!—than to conduct the study. My hope is that the new blood tests will get the recruitment time down to less than a year.

All of this progress hinges, of course, on continued funding for Alzheimer’s research. Some of the biggest breakthroughs to date were supported by federal grants, like the discovery of the connection between amyloid proteins and the disease. This isn’t unusual: Medical R&D often relies on government funding to support projects that explore foundational science or aren’t commercially viable yet.

We are on the cusp of turning the tide against dementia—which makes this an especially bad time to pull back on research. Recent cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other government institutions threaten to stop progress in its tracks, and no individual or private organization can fill the gap.

This is the moment to spend more money on research, not less. Right now, all over the world, researchers are collecting data about Alzheimer’s disease. New tools are making it easier for them to share information and work together. As a result, the quest to stop Alzheimer’s has never had more momentum. For my part, I worked with a coalition of partners to create the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and the Global Research and Imaging Platform, and I am proud to support organizations like the ADDF's Diagnostics Accelerator and Part the Cloud. All of these efforts simplify how researchers and data scientists work together to share data and develop algorithms and tools in order to make advances in the field.

There is still a huge amount of work to be done—like deepening our understanding of the disease’s pathology and developing even better diagnostics. But I am blown away by how much we have learned about Alzheimer’s over the last couple of years.

When we lost my dad, an Alzheimer’s diagnosis was a death sentence. Just five years later, that is finally starting to change. I cannot help but be filled with a sense of hope when I think of all the progress being made on Alzheimer’s, even with so many challenges happening around the world. We are closer than ever before to a world where no one has to watch someone they love suffer from this awful disease.

Open the newspaper, turn on the TV, or go online, and you’ll find alarming headlines about raging wildfires, devastating storms, and severe droughts. Climate change is staring us in the face, and the evidence is everywhere. What's harder to see, unless you know where to look, is growing evidence that we're making real progress in the fight against it. That's why I'm so excited to be in London this week for the Breakthrough Energy Summit. Here, this progress is on full display, and we’re bringing together global leaders, industry executives, innovators, and investors to accelerate it.

When we launched Breakthrough Energy back in 2015, the Paris Agreement had just been adopted. Nearly every country on earth committed to ambitious emissions cuts in the fight against climate change. But it was clear that meeting these goals would require unprecedented investment from the private sector to drive innovation. It would also require extraordinary collaboration across all sectors to get clean energy ideas out of the lab and into the market affordably and at scale. This work has been Breakthrough Energy's mission from day one.

At the first BE Summit in 2022, I shared updates on the cutting-edge concepts and companies we’re supporting that address the five grand challenges—manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, transportation, and buildings—behind most of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. This year, in London, we have much more to share: a portfolio of climate technologies that aren't just theoretical or promising anymore, but proven and ready for the market today.

That's what makes this summit so momentous. In less than a decade, investment has helped turn pipe dreams into a pipeline of transformative solutions. Now, it’s time to invest so those solutions can scale up, deploy, and slash emissions in every sector of the economy.

Manufacturing – 29% of global emissions

Manufacturing—how we make almost everything—is one of the hardest sources of emissions to cut. While the challenges here are complex, the pace of progress has been incredible, and faster than what I hoped when I started Breakthrough, especially in cement and steel, which each contribute around 10 percent of all global emissions. CarbonCure has pioneered a way to inject waste carbon into fresh concrete, the end product cement is used for—making the second-most consumed material on earth much greener. Their retrofits of existing facilities, deployed at over 800 locations worldwide, have prevented nearly half a million tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, Ecocem’s ACT technology for low-carbon cement was recently approved for full commercial use across Europe—while another of its low-carbon concrete solutions was used in construction for the Athletes’ Village at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris. And Boston Metal has nailed the production of “green” steel without coal at scale, and now has a facility up and running in Brazil.

Electricity – 29% of global emissions

Most experts agree that the world’s electricity needs will triple by 2050. And when it comes to climate change, electrification is a key part of the solution. But only if the electricity is green; otherwise, we’re just swapping one source of emissions for another. Until recently, we haven’t had good options for storing electricity at scale, which made it hard to get the most out of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Now, Form Energy’s affordable batteries can store this energy for multiple days and make it more reliable. Their West Virginia factory, which is nearing completion, is bringing over 750 jobs to a town whose tin mill recently closed. And TS Conductor’s advanced power lines, already commercially deployed, can double the amount of transmittable power and help maximize our current grid’s efficiency.

Agriculture – 20% of global emissions

What we grow and eat has a huge impact on the climate. But Pivot Bio is lessening that impact with microbial products that allow crops to draw nitrogen from the air, giving farmers something they’ve wanted for a long time: a more reliable and efficient form of fertilizer. Their solutions—which produce less than one percent of the emissions of synthetic fertilizers and need 1,000 times less water—are already being used across five million acres of land to help farmers improve productivity while eliminating emissions. And Rumin8, whose feed supplements have successfully reduced livestock methane emissions by over 90 percent while boosting productivity, demonstrates that we can enjoy beef and dairy without the high environmental costs they're typically associated with. They recently opened a demonstration plant in Australia to showcase the commercial viability of their products.

Transportation – 15% of global emissions

Electric vehicles are the future, but their batteries are made of resources that are both limited and difficult to source responsibly. One solution is recycling—and Redwood Materials has figured out a better way to do it. At their facility in Nevada, the metals found in recycled batteries are refined and then reused in new batteries, all while emitting 40 to 70 percent less than other recycling processes. But recycling alone won’t be enough to meet the growing demand for EVs and electrification more broadly. New supplies will be needed—something KoBold Metals has cracked the code on. They’re using AI to more reliably find minerals and metals that will undergird the energy transition, most recently copper in Zambia.

Long-distance and heavy-duty transportation still have significant technical hurdles to overcome, but there’s impressive progress being made, particularly in aviation and shipping. ZeroAvia, for instance, is developing hydrogen-electric aircraft engines with operations in the U.K. and U.S., and their prototype engines are successfully flying aircraft in early trials.

Buildings – 7% of global emissions

Ensuring that buildings are warm in the winter and cool in the summer takes a lot of energy—and much of it gets wasted by single-pane windows and leaky ducts that let heat and AC slip out. But there are new options to help fix these issues. LuxWall has created ultra-insulating window glass that is so efficient, it performs like a wall you can see through. After years of R&D, their windows are rolling off the production line at their first commercial factory in Michigan; once installed, the windows will cut both costs and emissions. Then there’s Aeroseal, whose innovative polymer technology finds and plugs air leaks in a building’s envelope and ducts and is already commercially deployed.

Carbon Management

To limit global warming, though, it’s not enough to stop emitting greenhouse gases going forward. We also need to manage what’s already been emitted. In Arkansas, Graphyte is turning plant waste into carbon-trapping bricks and burying them underground; if they sequester 50,000 tons of carbon by 2025 as planned, it will be the largest carbon removal project in the world. In California, Heirloom Carbon’s first-in-the-nation commercial Direct Air Capture facility uses limestone forty feet high to absorb carbon from the air like a sponge. The pilot facility is removing 1,000 tons a year already, and they have plans to scale rapidly.

These are just a few of the more than 100 BE-backed companies that are gathered in London this week to showcase their solutions—all addressing the grand challenges, all ready to work, and all proof that the Clean Industrial Revolution is here. (For more on the progress we’ve made and what’s still left to do, see BE’s latest State of the Transition report.)

Now we need to supercharge our support and ramp up our investments. With commitments and capital from governments and industry leaders, we can deploy these solutions and get them to scale. We can drive down the stubborn green premiums that make a lot of clean technologies more expensive than their dirty counterparts (and too expensive for widespread adoption). We can keep the innovation pipeline flowing. We can get much closer to an abundant, affordable, clean energy future.

Thanks to brilliant minds, big ideas, and bold investments, transformative climate tech has arrived. It's here in London. The Breakthrough Energy Summit is where the momentum that’s been building since 2015 meets the marketplace. I can’t wait to talk to everyone here about where we go next. And I’m eager to see how the connections, partnerships, and investments forged over the next few days help this climate tech reach everyone—and help us reach net zero.

Hello from Kemmerer, Wyoming! It’s been just over a year since my last visit, and I’m blown away by how much has changed.

One of the oldest buildings in downtown Kemmerer—once an opera house—has been restored and is now home to a mercantile and a bakery. Just down the street, the owners of the local coffee shop have purchased an 100-year-old building to expand their operation. A law office has opened, and city officials tell me that plans are moving forward for new multi- and single-family housing developments.

I’m thrilled to see so much economic growth happening, because Kemmerer will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world. I just left the groundbreaking ceremony for the first-ever Natrium plant, which will bring safe, next-generation nuclear technology to life right here in Wyoming. It’s a huge milestone for the local economy, America’s energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

Today is a big one for Kemmerer—for the coal plant workers who will be able to see their future job site being constructed across the highway, for the local construction workers who will be part of a 1,600-person skilled labor force building the plant, and for the local businesses that will take care of the new workforce. 

The plant was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. But my nuclear journey started several years earlier, when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant.

The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes. It would have a shorter construction timeline and be cheaper to operate. And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night. As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it—and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.

So, we started TerraPower, where nuclear scientists could take the concept and transform it into a reality. Since then, the amazing team at TerraPower has proven we can do nuclear better. They are leading the country—and the world—in developing safe, next-generation nuclear technology.

But that technology was just an idea in a lab and on a computer screen until today.

You can read more about the super cool science behind the Natrium plant here. Now that we’ve broken ground, the first order of business is to build the sodium test facility, which will test components and transfer the liquid sodium that will be used to cool the nuclear reactor. Construction will continue over the years ahead before the plant hopefully comes online in 2030.

For a project this big and this important to work, it takes private companies partnering with public leaders and governments. I can’t say enough good things about Mayor Bill Thek, Mayor Mark Langley, and the remarkable communities here in Kemmerer and Diamondville, who have embraced this project.

Today couldn’t have happened without the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is supporting the project with the largest single contribution the federal government has ever committed to a private project. If we’re going to solve climate change, it’s going to take courage, commitment, and partnership between the federal government and private industry, a point that Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has made repeatedly. Gov. Mark Gordon and Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis have been true champions, and we’re grateful for the support from TerraPower’s investors and development partners, including Bechtel, GE Hitachi, PacifiCorp, and Berkshire Hathaway.

What’s next? The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted TerraPower’s construction permit application for review last month. It’s a step that sounds bureaucratic but is, in fact, a huge deal and the first time something like this has happened with a commercial non-light water reactor in more than 40 years. This step starts the review process at the NRC for the permit application—once it is approved, construction can begin on the actual nuclear reactor.

The review process will take a couple of years, so in the meantime, TerraPower will continue to build the non-nuclear parts of the facility. Construction will begin next year on the so-called “energy island,” which is where the steam turbines and other machinery that actually generate power will sit. (The reactor will eventually be part of a “nuclear island,” and the team hopes to start building that in 2026.)

While these first-of-a-kind projects can be big and risky, they are too important for our future to fail to act. I’m proud of all those who have helped ensure the most advanced nuclear project in the world gets built right here in the United States.

I believe that the next-generation nuclear power plant that TerraPower is building here will power the future of our nation—and the world. Everything we do runs on electricity: buildings, technology, and increasingly transportation. To meet our economic and climate goals, we need more abundant clean energy, not less. The ground we broke in Kemmerer will soon be the bedrock of America’s energy future. Today, we took the biggest step yet toward safe, abundant, zero-carbon energy.

I was excited to get a drone for my birthday last year. I couldn’t wait to get it into the air and see what my backyard looked like from the sky. But, as anyone who has used one can tell you, I quickly learned a harsh truth: Flying a drone isn’t easy. It takes a lot of practice and skill.

Maybe it’s time to pull the drone back out, because I was lucky to get a lesson from the experts last month in India. During my visit to Delhi, I met with Sangita Devi, Sumintra Devi, and Kajol Kumari—three Drone Didis from Bihar who are taking India’s agricultural productivity to new heights.

The women I met are part of the Indian government’s Namo Drone Didi program. (Didi is the Hindi word for “sister.”) It was launched in 2023 to help rural women boost their income and boost India’s agricultural productivity—and although the program is still in its early days, I’m already impressed by its results.

Right now, the Drone Didis primarily use their flying skills to fertilize crops. Applying fertilizer via drone has a lot of benefits over doing it by hand. Since you can spray farther away from the plant, the liquid fertilizer becomes more atomized—which means that it turns into finer droplets that cover more area. This benefits both farmers and the environment, because you need significantly less fertilizer and less water to help distribute it. Plus, it’s faster. One Drone Didi can cover as much as five acres in the same time it would take five people to cover half an acre.

I cannot wait to see how the program expands in the years ahead. The Indian government has plans to equip the drones with advanced sensors and imaging technology. This will allow Drone Didis to use real-time data to deliver targeted interventions to improve the quality and quantity of farmers’ crops. They will be able to detect diseases and pests, assess soil moisture levels, monitor crop growth, and more.

I’m equally excited to track how the Drone Didi program continues to empower women across India. Every Didi is affiliated with a self-help group, or SHG. The plan is to provide nearly 15,000 drones to SHGs across India by the end of next year.

In the United States, where I live, self-help groups are usually associated with mental health. In India, they’re a form of mutual aid. Each SHG is small—most are around 12 people, although some are as big as 25—and brings together women to support each other socially and financially. They pool their savings, access microloans at lower interest rates, and solve problems in areas like health and education.

The Didis I met with were longtime members of SHGs organized by JEEViKA, an organization in Bihar that works to lift people from rural areas out of poverty. During our time together in Delhi, Kajol told me about how JEEViKA helped her open her own shop three years ago, where she sells seeds and fertilizers. She loves being an entrepreneur, and when she was approached about becoming a Drone Didi, she knew it would do wonders for her business.

Each Didi attends a training program in Hyderabad or Noida, where they are taught how to pilot the drone and apply fertilizer effectively. (I was surprised to hear that learning to fly is apparently easier and takes less time than learning to fertilize!) Other women in their SHGs are trained as drone technicians, ready to repair the machines if any problems arise.

In the less than two years, the Drone Didi program is already transforming the lives of its pilots. Kajol is using the extra income she’s earned to expand her shop offerings and build a warehouse to store her stock. She also plans to send her children to a better school. Sangita’s family couldn’t afford a bicycle before she became a Drone Didi—today, she is the proud owner of an auto rickshaw.

Sumintra hopes that, when people see someone like her flying a huge drone, it changes their perception of what women are capable of. Like many women in her area, she married very young and was expected to stay home with her children. Today, her kids call her “Pilot Mummy” and dream about her flying airplanes one day.

I hope you think of the Didis the next time you hear the buzz of a drone above you at a wedding or a park. It’s remarkable how one piece of technology can reshape what is possible in a community. Kajol told me that people sometimes look at her and say, “She’s flying too high! What will she do next?”

Her response? “This is just the beginning. Wait and see what’s coming.”

I’m an optimist by nature, but sometimes my optimism gets challenged. It’s not always easy to believe that the future is bright. Over the years, though, I’ve developed a trick that always helps cheer me up: I look to the unsung heroes who are doing amazing work around the world to improve people’s lives.  

I’ve written about many of them in my Heroes in the Field series, and today I want to introduce you to another one. Her name is Dora Shimbwambwa, and she’s a plant researcher in Zambia who’s using her expertise to help farmers thrive in a warming climate.

Dora works as a research officer at the Zambian office of the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, where she focuses on developing new ways to combat crop pests and diseases. Her research aims to help smallholder farmers improve their yields and incomes while promoting sustainable farming practices. As she explained, "My work involves creating awareness about crop pests and then researching different technologies that will help control the pest." 

Dora seems to have been born to do this work, though it took her a while to realize it. She grew up at the Cotton Development Trust, an agricultural research station in southern Zambia where her father worked. Surrounded by plant scientists, she was exposed to agricultural science from an early age, but like a lot of kids, she didn’t pay much attention to her dad’s work.  

When it was time to pick a career, she opted to follow in his footsteps, but mainly because she knew it would lead to a good job. Then, as she got into the work, she started to see the impact she could have for her community—“and from that time,” she says, “I haven’t looked back.” 

Dora is especially focused on an invasive pest called fall armyworm, which has devastated maize crops across Africa in recent years. Unfortunately, climate change is making crops even more vulnerable—fall armyworm thrives in a hot, dry environment, and Zambia is in the midst of its worst drought in 40 years. 

Synthetic pesticides are part of the solution, but they can be expensive, and they can kill other insects that are beneficial to the crops. So Dora is working on alternative methods, such as using biopesticides that target the fall armyworm specifically and don’t leave toxic residues. 

Beyond her scientific expertise, what impresses me about Dora is her commitment to working directly with farmers and agricultural extension officers. She regularly travels to rural communities to conduct trainings and field trials, ensuring that her research translates into real-world impact. She keeps farmers’ hours—usually getting out of bed around 3 a.m., a habit she has had since she was a young girl.  

Of course, none of this important work happens in isolation. Dora is quick to emphasize the collaborative nature of her research and acknowledge the people who have mentored her along the way. She's part of a growing network of African women in agricultural research, supported by organizations like African Women in Agricultural Research and Development. "Agriculture is mainly dominated by men,” Dora says. “So sometimes you just need a voice to guide you and give you confidence." 

Thanks in large part to young scientists like Dora, I’m quite bullish about the future of African agriculture. By developing effective and practical ways to help farmers grow more food and earn more money, they are helping to build a brighter future for Africa. And that should give all of us reason to be optimistic. 

Of all the things I thought would help fight malaria, 100-year-old mosquitoes would not have been high on the list. Then I learned about the work of Dr. Mara Lawniczak.

An evolutionary geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, Mara has spent much of her career trying to understand how the genomes of various mosquito species have changed in response to humans’ attempts to kill them. When, where, and how fast has it happened? What does that say about how they might evolve in the future?

In recent years, genetics has become an increasingly important tool for fighting malaria. Because mosquitoes breed so fast (a female can lay thousands of eggs in her lifespan of a couple of weeks), they evolve rapidly, at least compared to humans. By studying their genes, researchers are able to understand things like how they develop resistance to insecticides, crucial information that helps humans stay one step ahead.

After a few years of studying mosquitoes’ genomes, Mara had grown frustrated by the fact that the only insects available for study were ones that had been captured recently. Without DNA from their ancestors, there was no way to know how their genomes had responded to decades of human attacks. “We were often saying, ‘If only we could look into the past,’” Mara says. “And then it suddenly struck me: I'm sure there are historical collections of mosquitoes around.”

She was right. The Natural History Museum in London has a collection of 34 million insects from all over the world, carefully collected and preserved. Among the collection is a large sample of mosquitoes dating from 1936, when a British entomologist named H.S. Leeson spent a year in East Africa capturing and cataloguing the insects in the hope of learning more about malaria. Leeson didn’t know it at the time—DNA wouldn’t be discovered until the 1950s—but his collection of mosquitoes would become a vast source of genetic material that someone like Mara could study.

Mara reached out to the museum’s curators. They wanted to help, but there was a problem: Extracting DNA from the insects would require Mara to grind them up. Since the museum’s mission is to preserve its collection for future generations, they couldn’t let her do that.

So Mara and her colleagues invented a way around the problem. Working with the museum’s team, they developed a novel way to extract DNA from mosquitoes without damaging the specimen.

They affectionately call this work Project Neandersquito. It’s not because the mosquitoes date from the time of Neanderthals, some 40,000 years ago—this isn’t Jurassic Park, where they extract dinosaur DNA from a prehistoric mosquito trapped in amber. It’s because the mosquitoes they’re studying are 1,000 or 2,000 generations removed from modern ones, just as Neanderthals are more than 1,000 generations removed from modern humans.

Mara’s team has made some surprising finds. For example, because mosquitoes started developing resistance to the insecticide DDT in the 1950s, they expected to see genetic mutations for resistance appearing around the same time. But they didn’t. “We still don't see them even as late as the 1980s,” she says. “So the mosquitoes were somehow making themselves resistant to DDT in ways that we still don't really understand.”

They also hope to get insight into what's coming. “How fast can mosquitoes evolve? And as we throw new control initiatives at them, how quickly are they going to get around them?” Other labs are now using the process devised by the Lawniczak Group to do their own research.

Project Neandersquito is just one of the ways Mara and her team are using genomics to advance the fight against malaria. A different project, the Malaria Cell Atlas, is providing new genetic data that could inform the effort to make better malaria drugs and vaccines. Another project is designed to make it easier and cheaper to identify a mosquito’s species using its DNA—it’s surprisingly hard to do just by looking—as well as whether it’s carrying the parasite that causes malaria, and even which species of the parasite it has. Ultimately, the project’s goal is to help governments get data that will help them get the most out of their anti-malaria efforts.

Mara would be the first to say that these are just a few examples of the tools the world needs to eradicate malaria. It’s going to take global cooperation from governments, the private sector, and academia. And now we can add natural history museums to the list.

When you see someone suffering from a terrible disease, it’s hard not to imagine a world where no one has to feel this way ever again. But the problem with eradication is that it’s really, really hard. The fewer cases remain, the more difficult it is to find them. That’s why, in all of human history, we’ve only eradicated two diseases: smallpox and the cattle disease rinderpest.

That might change soon.

The world is close to eradicating Guinea worm disease, a debilitating and painful condition that once devastated an estimated 3.5 million people in Africa and South Asia every year. Thanks to heroes like Makoy Samuel Yibi, that number dropped to 13 people in 2023.

As the national director of the South Sudan Ministry of Health’s Guinea Worm Eradication Program, Makoy helped reduce the number of cases in his country last year to just two. That’s a remarkable accomplishment by any standard, but it’s truly impressive when you consider the circumstances he and his team have faced: civil wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, the political changes brought by South Sudan’s decision to become an independent country in 2011, and the fact that the nation was once home to 90 percent of the world’s Guinea worm cases.

I recently caught up with Makoy at the COP climate conference in Dubai, where we both participated in an event focused on ending neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, like Guinea worm. When you meet him in person, it’s hard to imagine a better person for the job. Makoy is passionate, brilliant, and laser-focused on making life better for the people of South Sudan. So I was surprised to learn that, as a young man, he never imagined a career in health.

Makoy was born in Terekeka County, a rural area located on the shores of the West Nile in southern Sudan. When he was a young man, Makoy had one primary focus: avoiding military service, which could be extremely dangerous. A chance meeting with a general from Terekeka resulted in a position with the national health department. A measles outbreak was ravaging parts of Sudan at the time, and Makoy’s first assignment was to travel from village to village providing care.

“What struck me,” he recalls, “was that, in every household we went to, we found at least half of the household was down with Guinea worm.”

The Guinea worm is a particularly nasty parasite. It’s unlikely to kill you, but the disease it causes—which is also called dracunculiasis, or “afflicted with little dragons”—can incapacitate you for months at a time and leave you permanently disabled. That can have devastating consequences if your family counts on you to grow the food you eat and sell it to make a living, as many people in South Sudan do.

The way the disease works is horrifying. If a person drinks water contaminated with Guinea worm larvae, the larvae enter the digestive system and mate. The impregnated female worm grows, undetected by the body’s immune system. Around a year later, the infected person will start to feel an itch somewhere on their body (usually the lower leg or foot). After a couple days, a painful blister appears and eventually bursts. The worm—which is now about one meter long—slowly starts to emerge from the wound.

This can take weeks or even months, and the pain it causes is excruciating. The wound can get infected, which could result in permanent disfigurement or even require amputation. And people often endure multiple worms emerging at the same time. Makoy has seen patients with as many as 40 worms.

And here’s the most insidious part: One of the few ways to relieve the pain of the blister is by soaking it in cold water, like a pond or a puddle. But that’s exactly what the worm wants. As soon as it touches water, it releases its larvae, starting the cycle anew. The Guinea worm is scarier and more efficient than any monster in a horror movie.

Makoy has seen countless times how devastating Guinea worm can be. “This is a situation where you see serious disruption of the livelihood of the community,” he says. “You see people going through a cycle of hunger because they don’t have enough. They have lost the window of cultivation. They’re not able to tend to their cattle, and there’s nothing they can do.”

There is no cure or treatment for Guinea worm, and yet, the world is on the doorstep of eradicating it. How? Through a series of highly effective interventions and a network of incredibly dedicated health workers.

Makoy’s team has built a network of volunteers in virtually every village in the country, who report rumors of Guinea worm cases. They spend every day searching for cases, getting the word out, and building trust in a country where more than 60 languages are spoken.

Makoy and his colleagues investigate every single rumor, no matter how remote. During the rainy season when the majority of cases happen, he often spends days hiking through the Sudd or up a mountain with all of his supplies on his back just to reach his destination. Last year, in a country the size of France with less than 100 miles of paved road, the team responded to nearly all of the 50,000 rumors they received within 24 hours.

Once the team finds a confirmed case, they make the patient as comfortable as possible and do what is called “controlled immersion.” This means soaking the affected area in a bucket of water and encouraging the worm to come out.

Makoy also spends a lot of time preventing people from getting Guinea worm in the first place. His team distributes free water filters and educates communities about safe water practices. The system they’ve built to support this work has strengthened health systems across the country, providing a platform for delivering other health services like childhood vaccination.

Makoy’s team has had a tremendous partner in all of this work: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center. In 1995, when Makoy was first starting his public health journey, President Carter negotiated what remains the longest humanitarian ceasefire in history when he helped convince both sides of the Second Sudanese Civil War to lay down their arms and allow health workers access to treat Guinea worm and other diseases, like polio and river blindness. Today, the Carter Center continues to lead the global eradication campaign’s march to zero. The Gates Foundation is proud to support the Carter Center as part of our overall efforts to tackle NTDs. (You can learn more about Makoy’s partnership with the Carter Center in a new film called The President and the Dragon that is coming out later this year.)

Eradication is now within sight, although it won’t be easy to eliminate the last few cases. South Sudan previously reported no Guinea worm in 2018, but cases were subsequently discovered after a peace agreement was reached in the South Sudanese Civil War. And Guinea worm has recently been detected in dogs and other animals, mainly in Chad. Eradication will require stopping all transmission, both human and animal.

But Makoy Samuel Yibi is optimistic we can get there—and so am I. His determination to root out every last case makes me hopeful that we will someday soon celebrate the end of Guinea worm disease.

“In the places where Guinea worm has been eliminated,” he says, “you can actually see how communities have been energized. They are more active, and they are productive. The communities are now empowered to be more self-sufficient, because they don’t have to worry about Guinea worm.”

Officially, Uganda’s maternal mortality rate is double the global average. But because that number doesn’t count those who give birth at home—in a country where poverty, distance, stigma, and distrust are all barriers to medical care—Eva Nangalo believes the real one may be much higher.

That’s why, as a midwife determined to eliminate these deaths altogether, she’s spent the past 23 years working to make hospital deliveries both more safe and more common.

For Nangalo, this is more than a job. It’s her life’s work, and something she’s felt called to do for as long as she can remember. “I was created to be a midwife, born to be a midwife, trained to be a midwife,” she said. “It’s what is in my DNA. That’s what I am.”

Working the night shift at Nakaseke General Hospital in rural central Uganda and tending to her family’s farm while off the clock, Nangalo is known for sleeping maybe one or two hours, if that, a day. When the power goes out in the middle of a delivery—which happens often—she uses the flashlight on her cellphone to get the job done. She even keeps her hair short rather than style it the way she’d prefer.

In her own words: “I’ve wanted my hair to be like other women. But then I think of the one dollar saving a mother’s life.”

That isn’t theoretical. Nangalo regularly reaches into her own pockets to ensure that expecting mothers have the transportation they need to get to the hospital in the first place—and the food, milk, and medicine they and their babies need to survive not only childbirth but also what comes next. She once tore a piece of her own bedsheet to give to a mother who didn’t have one at home.

It’s no wonder she’s made a name for herself—literally—among the women she’s served, with many choosing to name their daughters after her.

Her advocacy efforts—and their effects—are broad and far-reaching. Understanding the fears and misconceptions that exist in Uganda around healthcare facilities, she uses the radio to reach skeptics and explain the merits of hospital deliveries and the higher risks of fatal infection and bleeding inherent to home births. She helped establish a newborn clinic in Nakaseke, improving the safety of childbirth at the hospital and increasing the number of families served. She even pushed the government to make good on its own policies and open a health facility in every sub-county.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Eva Nangalo is making childbirth in Uganda safer for everyone involved.

“The future looks bright,” one colleague said, “if we have more and more people like Eva.” Fortunately, she’s working to ensure that’s exactly what happens.

My dad passed away peacefully at home yesterday, surrounded by his family.

We will miss him more than we can express right now. We are feeling grief but also gratitude. My dad’s passing was not unexpected—he was 94 years old and his health had been declining—so we have all had a long time to reflect on just how lucky we are to have had this amazing man in our lives for so many years. And we are not alone in these feelings. My dad’s wisdom, generosity, empathy, and humility had a huge influence on people around the world.

My sisters, Kristi and Libby, and I are very lucky to have been raised by our mom and dad. They gave us constant encouragement and were always patient with us. I knew their love and support were unconditional, even when we clashed in my teenage years. I am sure that’s one of the reasons why I felt comfortable taking some big risks when I was young, like leaving college to start Microsoft with Paul Allen. I knew they would be in my corner even if I failed.

As I got older, I came to appreciate my dad’s quiet influence on almost everything I have done in life. In Microsoft’s early years, I turned to him at key moments to seek his legal counsel. (Incidentally, my dad played a similar role for Howard Schultz of Starbucks, helping him out at a key juncture in his business life. I suspect there are many others who have similar stories.)

My dad also had a profound influence on my drive. When I was a kid, he wasn’t prescriptive or domineering, and yet he never let me coast along at things I was good at, and he always pushed me to try things I hated or didn’t think I could do (swimming and soccer, for example). And he modeled an amazing work ethic. He was one of the hardest-working and most respected lawyers in Seattle, as well as a major civic leader in our region.

My dad’s influence on our philanthropy was just as big. Throughout my childhood, he and my mom taught me by example what generosity looked like in how they used their time and resources. One night in the 1990s, before we started our foundation, Melinda, Dad, and I were standing in line at the movies. Melinda and I were talking about how we had been getting more requests for donations in the mail. Dad simply said, “Maybe I can help.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would not be what it is today without my dad. More than anyone else, he shaped the values of the foundation. He was collaborative, judicious, and serious about learning. He was dignified but hated anything that seemed pretentious. (Dad’s given name was William H. Gates II, but he never used the “II”—he thought it sounded stuffy.) He was great at stepping back and seeing the big picture. He was quick to tear up when he saw people suffering in the world. And he would not let any of us forget the people behind the strategies we were discussing.

People who came through the doors of the Gates Foundation felt honored to work with my dad. He saw the best in everyone and made everyone feel special.

We worked together at the foundation not so much as father and son but as friends and colleagues. He and I had always wanted to do something concrete together. When we started doing so in a big way at the foundation, we had no idea how much fun we would have. We only grew closer during more than two decades of working together.

Finally, my dad had a profoundly positive influence on my most important roles—husband and father. When I am at my best, I know it is because of what I learned from my dad about respecting women, honoring individuality, and guiding children’s choices with love and respect.

Dad wrote me a letter on my 50^th birthday. It is one of my most prized possessions. In it, he encouraged me to stay curious. He said some very touching things about how much he loved being a father to my sisters and me. “Over time,” he wrote, “I have cautioned you and others about the overuse of the adjective ‘incredible’ to apply to facts that were short of meeting its high standard. This is a word with huge meaning to be used only in extraordinary settings. What I want to say, here, is simply that the experience of being your father has been… incredible.”

I know he would not want me to overuse the word, but there is no danger of doing that now. The experience of being the son of Bill Gates was incredible. People used to ask my dad if he was the real Bill Gates. The truth is, he was everything I try to be. I will miss him every day.

My family worked together on a wonderful obituary for my dad, which you can read here.

I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of former president Jimmy Carter, and my heart is heavy for the whole Carter family. For more than two decades, I’ve had a chance to work with Jimmy, Rosalynn, and the Carter Center on several global health efforts, including our mutual work to eliminate deadly and debilitating diseases.

The Carters were among my first and most inspiring role models in global health. Over time, we became good friends. They played a pretty profound role in the early days of the Gates Foundation. I’m especially grateful that they introduced us to Dr. Bill Foege, who once helped eradicate smallpox and was a key advisor for our global health work.

Jimmy and Rosalynn were also good friends to my dad. One of my favorite photographs of all time shows Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and my dad in South Africa holding babies at a medical clinic. I remember my dad coming back from that trip with a whole new appreciation for Jimmy’s passion for helping people with HIV. At the time, then-President Thabo Mbeki was refusing to let people with HIV get treatment, and my dad watched Jimmy almost get into a fist fight with Mbeki over the issue. As Jimmy said in a 2012 conversation at the Gates Foundation hosted by my dad, “He was claiming there was no relationship between HIV and AIDS and that the medicines that we were sending in, the antiretroviral medicines, were a white person’s plot to help kill black babies.” At a time when a quarter of all people in South Africa were HIV positive, Jimmy just couldn’t accept Mbeki’s obstructionism.

As with HIV, Jimmy was on the right side of history on many issues. During his childhood in rural Georgia, racial hatred was rampant, but he developed a lifelong commitment to equality and fairness. Whenever I spent time with him, I saw that commitment in action. He had a remarkable internal compass that steered him to pursue justice and equality here in America and around the world.

After Jimmy “involuntarily retired” (his term) from the White House, he reset the bar for how Presidents could use their time and influence after leaving office. When he started the Carter Center, he gave a huge shot in the arm to efforts to treat and cure diseases that rich governments were ignoring, like river blindness and Guinea worm. The latter once devastated an estimated 3.5 million people in Africa and South Asia every year. That total dropped to just 14 cases in 2023, thanks to the incredible efforts of the Carter Center.

When the world eradicates Guinea worm, it will be a testament to Jimmy’s dedication—and yet another remarkable achievement to add to his list of accomplishments. He won the United Nations Human Rights Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote 30 books. He helped monitor more than 100 elections in countries with fragile democracies—and did not pull and punches about the ways America’s own democracy was being undermined from within.

He worked to erase the stigma of mental illness and improved access to care for millions of Americans. He taught at Emory University. He built hundreds of homes with Habitat for Humanity. And, as I saw when I visited with Jimmy and Rosalynn in Plains a few years ago, he also painted, built wooden furniture, and took the time to offer his intellect and wisdom to people from all walks of life. As he once told my dad, tongue in cheek, “I have Secret Service protection, so I can pretty well do what I want to!”

Whenever I have struggled with a global health challenge, I knew I could call him and ask for his candid advice. It’s just starting to sink in that I can no longer do that.

But President Carter’s example of moral leadership will inspire me for as long as I’m able to pursue philanthropy—just as it will the hundreds of millions of people whose lives he touched through peacemaking, preaching, teaching, science, and medicine. James Earl Carter Jr. was an incredible statesman and human being. I will miss him dearly.

Part 1 of the Netflix documentary series Inside Bill’s Brain tells the story of the Gates Foundation’s quest to rethink sanitation for the world’s poorest. First step: reinvent the toilet! This belief in the power of innovation has been a constant in my life, starting from the time I fell in love with software in high school to my work today at our foundation. What follows is the story of a moment of clarity for me on that path and the influence of someone who’s been a critical guide along the way.

If you’d have asked me in my twenties if I’d ever retire early from Microsoft, I’d have told you that you were crazy. I loved the magic of software, and the ever-rising learning curve that Microsoft provided. It was hard for me to imagine anything else I’d rather do.

By my mid-forties my perspective was changing. The U.S. government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft had drained me, sucking some of the joy out of my work. Stepping down as CEO in early 2000, I hoped to focus more on building software products, always the best part of my job.

Also, my world view was broadening. Both Melinda and I were feeling a strengthening pull toward our young foundation and its work in U.S. education and the development of drugs and vaccines for diseases in poor countries. For the first time in my adult life I allowed myself space for non-Microsoft reading, soaking up books on the immune system, malaria and the history of plagues just as I had once scoured The Art of Computer Programming.

With our commitment to philanthropy growing, Melinda and I transferred $20 billion of Microsoft stock to our foundation, making it the largest of its kind in the world. Within a year I’d taken my first overseas trip for the foundation, to India, where I squeezed drops of polio vaccine into babies’ mouths. Melinda traveled to Thailand and India to study how those countries were handling AIDS.

Our good friend Warren Buffett was curious about this new journey we were on. So in the fall of 2001, he invited me to a resort in West Virginia and asked me to speak to a group of business leaders about what Melinda and I were learning.

I’m not a natural public speaker. But at Microsoft, speech after speech, year after year, I learned to step out on a stage and paint a vision of technology for our customers, partners and the media. It helped that people wanted to hear about the white-hot software industry. I grew to enjoy it.

I felt like I was starting over with our foundation. At big global meetings, like the World Economic Forum, people flocked to hear me detail some cool piece of software, but the crowd and the energy would be gone when later that day I’d announce an innovative plan to get vaccines to millions of children.

At the time, many people I met thought health problems in low-income countries were so big and intractable that no amount of money could make any significant difference. I could see why. It was easy to ignore death and disease happening so far away. And so much of what we read in the news about global health focused on doom and gloom. This frustrated me. The problems were real enough, but so is the power of human ingenuity to find solutions. Melinda and I felt a strong sense of optimism, but we didn’t see that reflected in these stories.

Right around the time Warren asked me to give the talk, Melinda and I were trying to figure out how we might use our voices to raise the visibility of global health. Would anyone listen?

My speech to Warren’s friends was a chance to practice. If I could stir them, it would be a step towards persuading the people with the power to make the biggest difference: the legislators and heads of countries who decide how much money flows into foreign aid and global health.

I was a little nervous heading to the conference room where Warren’s group was gathered—but more than that, I was exhausted. We were in the midst of negotiations over the antitrust case, and I’d been on the phone with lawyers deep into the night. I hadn’t had time to write a full speech. I’d just jotted notes between calls, trying to simplify all we had learned into the clearest possible story.

I started talking, haltingly at first. Our big revelation, I explained, had come in the mid-1990s when Melinda and I realized how much misery in poor countries is caused by health problems that the rich world had stopped trying to solve because we’re no longer affected by them. That incensed us. The cost of that inequity at the time was three million children dying ever year, I said.

Those deaths, we realized, weren’t caused by a bunch of runaway diseases, but by a handful of illnesses that are largely treatable. Diarrhea and pneumonia alone were responsible for half of the deaths among children. Many of those children could be saved with medicines and vaccines that already existed. All that was lacking were incentives and systems to get those life-saving technologies to the people and places where they were needed—and some new inventions to speed the change.

Our philanthropy, I explained, followed the same philosophy that guided Microsoft: relentless innovation. The right vaccine can wipe a deadly virus off the planet. A better toilet can help stop diarrheal disease. Investments in science and technology can help millions to survive their childhood and lead healthy productive lives—potentially the greatest return in R&D spending ever.

As I spoke, the legal tangles that had consumed me the night before vanished. I was energized. When ideas excite me, I rock, I sway, I pace—my body turns into a metronome for my brain. For the first time, all the facts and figures, anecdotes and analyses cohered into a story that was uplifting—even for me. I was able to make clear the logic of our giving and why I was so optimistic that a combination of money, technology, scientific breakthroughs, and political will could make a more equitable world faster than a lot of people thought.

I could tell from the nods and laughs and caliber of questions that the group got it. Afterward, Warren came over with a big smile. “That was amazing, Bill,” he said. “What you said was amazing, and your energy around this work is amazing.” I grinned back at him. Three ‘amazings’—a first.

The confidence I found that day encouraged me to take a more public role on global health issues. Over the next year, I refined my message at events and in interviews. I spent more time talking about health with government leaders. (That’s now a big part of my job.)

But something else had happened, too. The speech helped me see more clearly a life for myself after Microsoft, centered on the work that Melinda and I had started. Software would remain my focus for years and I will always consider it the thing that most shaped who I am. But I felt energized to get further along this new path we were traveling, to learn more and to apply myself to the obstacles in the way of more people living better lives. Eventually, I would retire from Microsoft almost a decade earlier that I had planned. The 2001 speech was a step, a private moment, on the way to that decision.

Now I get to focus every day on trying to deliver the vision I outlined in that conference room almost two decades ago. The world is more equitable now than it was then. But we’ve still got a long way to go. By letting Netflix’s cameras in, I hope you can see the joy I get from my work and why I am so optimistic that with ingenuity, imagination, and determination, we can make even more progress towards that goal.

I was twenty when I gave my first public speech. It was 1976, Microsoft was almost a year old, and I was explaining software to a room of a few hundred computer hobbyists. My main memory of that time at the podium was how nervous I felt. In the half century since, I’ve spoken to many thousands of people and gotten very comfortable delivering thoughts on any number of topics, from software to work being done in global health, climate change, and the other issues I regularly write about here on Gates Notes.

One thing that isn’t on that list: myself. In the fifty years I’ve been in the public eye, I’ve rarely spoken or written about my own story or revealed details of my personal life. That wasn’t just out of a preference for privacy. By nature, I tend to focus outward. My attention is drawn to new ideas and people that help solve the problems I’m working on. And though I love learning history, I never spent much time looking at my own.  

But like many people my age—I’ll turn 70 this year—several years ago I started a period of reflection. My three children were well along their own paths in life. I’d witnessed the slow decline and death of my father from Alzheimer’s. I began digging through old photographs, family papers, and boxes of memorabilia, such as school reports my mother had saved, as well as printouts of computer code I hadn't seen in decades. I also started sitting down to record my memories and got help gathering stories from family members and old friends. It was the first time I made a concerted effort to try to see how all the memories from long ago might give insight into who I am now.

The result of that process is a book that will be published on Feb. 4: my first memoir, Source Code. You can order it here. (I’m donating my proceeds from the book to the United Way.)

Source Code is the story of the early part of my life, from growing up in Seattle through the beginnings of Microsoft. I share what it was like to be a precocious, sometimes difficult kid, the restless middle child of two dedicated and ambitious parents who didn’t always know what to make of me. In writing the book I came to better understand the people that shaped me and the experiences that led to the creation of a world-changing company.

In Source Code you’ll learn about how Paul Allen and I came to realize that software was going to change the world, and the moment in December 1974 when he burst into my college dorm room with the issue of Popular Electronics that would inspire us to drop everything and start our company. You’ll also meet my extended family, like the grandmother who taught me how to play cards and, along the way, how to think. You’ll meet teachers, mentors, and friends who challenged me and helped propel me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until much later. 

Some of the moments that I write about, like that Popular Electronics story, are ones I’ve always known were important in my life. But with many of the most personal moments, I only saw how important they were when I considered them from my perspective now, decades later. Writing helped me see the connection between my early interests and idiosyncrasies and the work I would do at Microsoft and even the Gates Foundation.

Some of the stories in the book were hard for me to tell. I was a kid who was out of step with most of my peers, happier reading on my own than doing almost anything else. I was tough on my parents from a very early age. I wanted autonomy and resisted my mother’s efforts to control me. A therapist back then helped me see that I would be independent soon enough and should end the battle that I was waging at home. Part of growing up was understanding certain aspects of myself and learning to handle them better. It’s an ongoing process.

One of the most difficult parts of writing Source Code was revisiting the death of my first close friend when I was 16. He was brilliant, mature beyond his years, and, unlike most people in my life at the time, he understood me. It was my first experience with death up close, and I’m grateful I got to spend time processing the memories of that tragedy.

The need to look into myself to write Source Code was a new experience for me. The deeper I got, the more I enjoyed parsing my past. I’ll continue this journey and plan to cover my software career in a future book, and eventually I’ll write one about my philanthropic work. As a first step, though, I hope you enjoy Source Code.

Microsoft turns 50 years old tomorrow. As we’ve gotten closer to the anniversary, I have found myself reflecting back on the journey that led us to this point—and especially on the people who got us here.

In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. That vision became a reality long ago, and in the years since, Microsoft has continued to build a future where innovation makes life easier and work more productive. We couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella. Every single person who has worked at Microsoft over the years is a key part of its success too.

The truth is, for much of my life, I didn’t like to celebrate work milestones. When I was at Microsoft, I would insist we didn’t have time to talk about them. But as I got older, I learned how important it is to celebrate the wins in life. And making it 50 years is a huge cause for celebration.

The coolest code I’ve ever written

Although I am excited to join Steve, Satya, and everyone who helped make the company a success tomorrow in Redmond to celebrate its anniversary, I admit that reaching this milestone feels bittersweet. It’s hard to believe that such a significant piece of my life has been around for a half-century!

It feels like just yesterday that Paul and I were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company.

That code remains the coolest code I’ve ever written to this day—and you can see it for yourself at the bottom of this page. 

The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor.

At the time, personal computers were practically non-existent. Paul and I knew that creating software that let people program the Altair could revolutionize the way people interacted with these machines. So, we reached out to Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, and told him we had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on. 

There was just one problem: We didn’t. It was time to get to work.

The basics of BASIC

Invented by two Dartmouth College professors in 1964, BASIC was designed to be easy to learn for people with no computer experience. With little study or technical aptitude, a person can write their own software in BASIC—anything from a checkbook-balancing program to a tic-tac-toe game. BASIC was the first language Paul and I learned (and it’s still used today). 

Computer languages like BASIC serve the same purpose as English or any other language. In the same way that you can use English to order a coffee at a café, you can use BASIC to tell a computer to run a program, solve a math problem, or perform some other task. 

Translating BASIC

There is a catch, though: Computers don’t speak BASIC. And the language they do speak is so complex and unintuitive that programming in it is incredibly difficult. To bridge the gap, Paul and I set out to create a BASIC interpreter, which would translate code into instructions the computer understood line by line as the program runs. 

We considered creating a similar tool called a compiler that translates the entire program and then runs it all at once. But we figured the line-by-line approach of an interpreter would be helpful to novice programmers since it would give instant feedback on their code, allowing them to fix any mistakes as they crop up. 

Getting started

Paul and I decided to divide and conquer. We didn’t have the Intel 8080 chip that the Altair computer ran on, so Paul got to work writing a program that would simulate one on Harvard’s PDP-10 mainframe. This allowed us to test our software without needing an actual Altair. Meanwhile, I focused on writing the main code for the program while another friend, Monte Davidoff, worked on a portion called the math package. We coded day and night for the two months to create the software we had said already existed.

Overcoming obstacles

Computer memory back then was expensive. Extra memory for the Altair could easily cost more than the computer itself, so every byte mattered. We thought that if we could fit our BASIC code into just four kilobytes, Altair owners using BASIC could still have enough memory left to run the programs they wrote (and not have to spend a lot of extra money). To meet that constraint, I used various techniques to optimize memory usage, like compact data structures and efficient algorithms. It was a fun challenge, and although Paul and I were stressed about getting Altair BASIC to MITS as quickly as possible, I had a blast figuring out how to make everything fit.

The birth of Microsoft

Finally, after lots of sleepless nights, we were ready to show our BASIC interpreter to Ed Roberts. The demonstration was a success, and MITS agreed to license the software. This was a pivotal moment for Paul and me. Altair BASIC became the first product of our new company, which we decided to call Micro-Soft. (We later dropped the hyphen.) 

You can read more about the origin of Altair BASIC—including about how Paul had to finish part of the code on a flight to Albuquerque—in my memoir Source Code. 

It’s amazing to think about how this one piece of code led to a half century of innovation from Microsoft. Thanks to leaders like Steve and Satya, the company has reached levels of success that Paul and I could only dream of all those years ago in the Harvard computer lab. 

Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was the original source code—and I still get a kick out of seeing it, even all these years later.

DOWNLOAD THE CODE

Look through the original Microsoft source code for yourself. Computer programming has come a long way over the last fifty years, but I’m still super proud of how it turned out.

I was an extremely lucky kid. I was born to great parents who did everything to set me up for success. I grew up in a city I love and still call home, at the dawn of the computer age. And I went to one of two schools in my state—one of a handful in the country—that actually had computer access. These were all strokes of luck that helped shape my future.

But equally important, maybe most important, were the teachers I was fortunate enough to learn from along the way. In my new book, Source Code, I write about many of them. From grade school through college, I had teachers who saw my potential (even when it was buried under bad behavior), gave me real responsibilities, let me learn through experience instead of lectures, and created space for me to explore my passions.

These five brilliant teachers didn’t just teach me subjects; they taught me how to think about the world and what I might accomplish in it. Looking back, I realize how rare this was—and how lucky I was to find it over and over again. 

Blanche Caffiere

Blanche Caffiere entered my life twice—first as my first-grade teacher, and later as my first “boss,” when I was in fourth grade at View Ridge Elementary and she was the librarian. At the time, I was a handful in (and out of) class: energetic, disruptive, constantly lost in my own thoughts. Most teachers and administrators saw me as a problem to be solved. But Mrs. Caffiere saw a problem-solver in me instead. When one of my teachers struggled with how to challenge me and channel my energy, she stepped in and gave me a job as her library assistant. 

“What you need is kind of like a detective,” I said when she tasked me with finding missing books that were lost somewhere in the library. I warmed to the work immediately, roaming the stacks until I found each one. Then Mrs. Caffiere taught me the Dewey Decimal system by having me memorize a clever story about a caveman, so I could figure out where each book belonged. For a kid who loved reading and numbers, it was a dream job. I felt essential. I stayed through recess that first day, showed up early the next morning, and ended up working in the library for the rest of the year.

When my family moved and I had to leave View Ridge Elementary, I was most devastated about leaving my library job. “Who will find the lost books?” I asked. Mrs. Caffiere responded that I could be a library assistant at my new school. She understood that what I needed wasn’t just busy work, but a sense of being valued and trusted with real responsibility. She’d been teaching for nearly forty years when we met, which meant she’d seen every kind of student imaginable. But she had a particular gift for helping those at the extremes—the ones who were struggling or excelling—find their way. I was a little of both, and she certainly helped me find mine.

Paul Stocklin

Paul Stocklin’s eighth-grade math class at Lakeside changed my life in two profound ways, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. First, it was where I met Kent Evans, who would become my best friend and earliest “business” partner before his tragic death in a mountain climbing accident at age 17. Like me, Kent didn’t easily fit into the established cliques at Lakeside. Unlike me, he had a clear vision for his future, which inspired me to start thinking about my own.

It was also in Mr. Stocklin’s class that I first saw a teletype machine—an encounter that would shape my entire future. One morning, Mr. Stocklin led our class down a hall in McAllister House, a white clapboard building at Lakeside that was home to the school’s math department, where we heard an unusual “chug-chug-chug” sound echoing from inside a room. There, we saw something that looked like a typewriter with a rotary telephone dial. Mr. Stocklin explained that it was a teletype machine connected to a computer in California. With it, we could play games and even write our own computer programs—something I’d never thought I’d be able to do myself. That moment opened up a whole new world for me.

There’s a lot more I’ve come to appreciate about Mr. Stocklin, including how much he encouraged an early love of math in me. But it’s undeniable that he changed my life by facilitating two of the most important relationships of my early years: my friendship with Kent, and my introduction to computing. These were gifts from him that I’ll appreciate forever, even though one would end in heartbreak.

Bill Dougall

Bill Dougall embodied what made Lakeside special—he was a World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer who brought real-world experience to teaching. Beyond his degrees in engineering and education, he had even studied French literature at the Sorbonne. He was the kind of Renaissance man who took sabbaticals to build windmills in Kathmandu.

As head of Lakeside’s math department, Mr. Dougall was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class. Even though it was expensive—over $1,000 a year for the terminal and thousands more in computer time—he helped convince the Mothers’ Club to use the proceeds from their annual rummage sale to lease a Teletype ASR-33.

The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn’t actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out. His famous camping trips, a sacred tradition at Lakeside, showed another side of his belief in experiential learning. These treks took students through whatever weather the Pacific Northwest could throw at forty boys and a few intrepid teachers. They taught resilience, teamwork, and problem-solving in a way that no classroom ever could. That was the essence of Mr. Dougall’s teaching philosophy.

Fred Wright

Fred Wright was exactly the kind of teacher we needed in the computer room at Lakeside. He had no practical computer experience, though he’d studied the FORTRAN programming language. But he was relatively young (in his late twenties) and only recently hired, and he intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction.  

Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we’d have to get creative. At some point, a student taped a sign above the door that said “Beware of the Wrath of Fred Wright”—a tongue-in-cheek nod to his laissez-faire oversight of the computer room. Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy.

Officially, he was the adult sponsor of our work at Lakeside. Unofficially, Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential. That was also his approach to geometry class, where I was his student in tenth grade. I remember him watching with amusement as I powered through problems using algebra instead of geometry. Rather than force me to do it the right way, he let me forge my own path, knowing I’d eventually figure out the more efficient (geometric) solution. 

Daniel Morris 

Dr. Daniel Morris was different from most high school science teachers. With a PhD from Yale and a patent for isolating tryptophan, he was a former industrial chemist who brought real-world expertise to our chemistry classroom. Some might have found it pretentious that he wore a lab coat and drank coffee from a glass beaker, but he earned those rights. I think he also earned the label that I’ve long used to describe him: the world’s greatest chemistry teacher. 

What made Dr. Morris so memorable was his ability to transform the rote memorization that most people associate with chemistry into unifying concepts that explain the world around us. He demystified complex processes by using everyday examples—to teach, for example, why soda stays fizzy if you put the cap back on, or what makes super glue that sticky. The introduction he wrote to his own chemistry textbook captures his teaching style perfectly: “We seem to forget the true foundation stone of science: the belief that the world makes sense.”

Before him, the sciences were subjects I did well in analytically but didn’t much care to practically understand or apply. That wasn’t good enough for Dr. Morris, who gave me a hard time for just getting by with what I already knew. Instead, he forced me into the lab to do experiments; to this day, I trace my love of science back to the demands he put on me to really get chemistry. He’s the reason I decided to take organic chemistry at Harvard—even though the class was mostly pre-med students, and I had no plans to become a doctor. (I got a C, my lowest grade in college, but I don’t think I ever told him.)

Tom Cheatham 

Looking back on my time at Harvard, I’m grateful for Professor Tom Cheatham’s hands-off approach to some of the most hands-on learning I’ve ever done. As director of the Aiken Computation Lab, he made an extraordinary exception by granting me access to the school’s PDP-10 computer—a privilege typically reserved for graduate students and other professors. Back then, Harvard didn’t even have an undergraduate computer science major.  

When we first met, I was an overconfident freshman, practically jumping out of my chair as I pitched him on all my ideas; I remember him taking drags on his Parliament cigarettes as I spoke, seeming pretty uninterested. I later learned that administrative tasks—signing students’ study cards and managing the day-to-day of the lab—were Cheatham’s least favorite parts of his job. Having come to Harvard after years working in industry and government, he was a programmer at heart, designing new computer languages when he wasn’t off meeting with the Department of Defense and securing more funding for the lab.

But he must have seen (and liked) something in me—either my technical experience, my teenage enthusiasm, or both. In my sophomore year, he made another exception and agreed to be my advisor for an engineering independent study to write a computerized baseball game. While I regret that we never formed a closer relationship, Cheatham was clearly in my corner. I knew that then and was reminded of it again recently, when I saw my old college records and learned how he’d defended me when I got in trouble for bringing friends into the lab without permission: It would be a “travesty of justice” if I were forced to withdraw from Harvard, Cheatham told the university’s Administrative Board, adding that he “would be delighted to have BG computing at the Center next year.”

I don’t think I ever properly thanked any of my teachers, including Professor Cheatham, for seeing something in me that I didn’t always see in myself. So many of them passed away before I had the chance. But I am who I am today because of their influence. So in Source Code, I’m sharing their stories and giving credit where it’s due. After all, one brilliant teacher, one mind-blowing class, is enough to change a person’s life. I’m so lucky and grateful to have had many.  

I feel like I’m always learning, but I really go into serious learning mode when I’m starting a new project. In the early days of Microsoft, I read a ton about technology companies, and as I was starting the Gates Foundation, I researched the history of American philanthropy.

Writing my memoir Source Code, which came out earlier this year, was no different: I thought about what I could draw on from the best memoirs I’ve read.

So for this year’s Summer Books, I want to share a few of them. With the exception of Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope, I read all of these before finishing Source Code—in fact I read Katharine Graham’s Personal History years before I even decided to start writing. (Nick’s book is so good that I wanted to share it anyway.)

You won’t find a direct correlation between any of these books and Source Code. But I think it has shades of Bono’s vulnerability about his own challenges, Tara Westover’s evolving view of her parents, and Trevor Noah’s sense as a kid that he didn’t quite fit in.

In any case, I hope you can find something that interests you on this list. Memoirs are a good reminder that people have countless interesting stories to tell about their lives.

Personal History, by Katharine Graham. I met Kay Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, on July 5, 1991—the same day I met Warren Buffett—and we became good friends. I loved hearing Kay talk about her remarkable life: taking over the Post at a time when few women were in leadership positions like that, standing up to President Nixon to protect the paper’s reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, negotiating the end to a pressman’s strike, and much more. This thoughtful memoir is a good reminder that great leaders can come from unexpected places.

Chasing Hope, by Nicholas Kristof. In 1997, Nick Kristof wrote an article that changed the course of my life. It was about the huge number of children in poor countries who were dying from diarrhea—and it helped me decide what I wanted to focus my philanthropic giving on. I’ve been following Nick’s work ever since, and we’ve stayed in touch. He’s reported from more than 150 countries, covering war, poverty, health, and human rights. In this terrific memoir, Nick writes about how he stays optimistic about the world despite everything he’s seen. His book made me think: The world would be better off with more Nick Kristofs.

Educated, by Tara Westover. Tara grew up in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho, raised by parents who believed that doomsday was coming and that the family should interact with the outside world as little as possible. Eventually she broke away from her parents—a process that felt like a much more extreme version of what I went through as a kid, and what I think a lot of people go through: At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking your parents know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. Tara beautifully captures that process of self-discovery in this unforgettable memoir.

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. Back in 2017, I said this memoir shows how the former Daily Show host’s “approach has been honed over a lifetime of never quite fitting in.” I also grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in at times, although Trevor has a much stronger claim to the phrase than I do. He was a biracial child in apartheid South Africa, a country where mixed-race relationships were forbidden. He was, as the title says, “born a crime.” In this book, and in his comedy, Trevor uses his outside perspective to his advantage. His outlook transcends borders.

Surrender, by Bono. I’m lucky that my parents were super supportive of my interest in computers—but Bono’s parents had a very different view of his passion for singing. He says his parents basically ignored him, which made him try even harder to get their attention. “The lack of interest of my father … in his son’s voice is not easy to explain, but it might have been crucial.” Bono shows a lot of vulnerability in this surprisingly open memoir, writing about his “need to be needed” and how he learned he’ll never fill his emotional needs by playing for huge crowds. It was a great model for how I could be open about my own challenges in Source Code.

July 5, 1991 was one of the most important days of my life. My mom was hosting a get-together at our family’s favorite vacation spot in Hood Canal, WA. One of her friends had invited Warren Buffett, and I immediately hit it off with him, kickstarting a relationship that would, among other things, lead to the creation of the Gates Foundation.

But Warren wasn’t the only legend in the room. I remember him introducing me to his old friend Katharine Graham, one of the most well-respected newspaper publishers in the world. Even after all these years—and after her death in 2001—I still treasure the friendship I began with Kay that day.

Kay is best known for leading the Washington Post through the Watergate crisis, but her remarkable story goes way beyond her fights with the Nixon White House. That story is told in her riveting memoir Personal History, which came out in 1997—just a few years before she passed away—and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Kay’s father purchased the Washington Post and saved it from bankruptcy when she was a teenager. In 1946, he made Kay’s husband, Philip Graham, the publisher of the paper. Although this decision sounds strange today—Why would you hand over the family business to your son-in-law instead of your own child?—the thought of putting a woman in charge was unthinkable in that era. “It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper,” she writes. Kay was expected to devote her life to being a good wife and mother.

But life with Phil wasn’t easy. He suffered from bipolar disorder at a time when treatments for mental illness were crude and ineffective. The chapters about his mental decline are devastating. Kay describes how Phil had to be sedated after suffering from a manic episode at a publishing conference. A few months later, he dies by suicide during a stay at the family’s country home. Kay is the first person to find his body.

While she was struggling with grief, Kay found herself thrust into a new role: president of the Washington Post Company and the publisher of a major national newspaper. That isn’t an easy job under any circumstances, but several of Kay’s male colleagues made it harder than it needed to be. “I didn’t blame my male colleagues for condescending—I just thought it was due to my being so new,” she writes. “It took the passage of time and the women’s lib years to alert me properly to the real problems of women in the workplace, including my own.”

Still, Kay internalized some of the skepticism, and she is pretty harsh on herself throughout the book. She blames herself for Phil’s suicide and describes her business acumen as “abysmally ignorant” when she takes over the Post. I understand her impulse to be critical of her younger self—I often felt frustrated by how I acted as a kid when I was writing my own memoir, Source Code. But it can be difficult to read at points in Personal History. I wish Kay knew how special she was.

Her story is a powerful reminder that strong leaders don’t always come in the form you expect. What Kay sees as weaknesses end up becoming her strengths. Because she didn’t know much about the newsroom when she took over in 1963, she asked a lot of questions. A more experienced publisher might have come into the job with preconceived notions about how to run things—but Kay listened to her new colleagues, and she took the time to learn how they worked. That trust in her people would pay off years later during the Watergate scandal.

I was a teenager during the Watergate years, and I remember reading about it in the paper. Many people focus on two specific events when they talk about Watergate: the break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, and President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 after secret recordings revealed his administration’s involvement in the burglary and subsequent cover-up. But during the more than two years between those two points, the Washington Post reported relentlessly on the scandal.

Nixon himself tried to bully them into giving up, but Kay stood by her newsroom. She protected their editorial independence, never asking her reporters to censor or soften their reporting. At one point, John Mitchell—the chair of Nixon’s re-election campaign and former Attorney General—told a Post reporter that Kay was going to get a certain part of her anatomy “caught in a big fat ringer.” She read about it in the paper the next day.

Kay risked the company’s reputation and financial health to protect journalistic integrity, even in the face of potential lawsuits and calls to discredit the paper. The Post almost folded at one point when the Nixon administration threatened to pull the broadcasting licenses for several TV stations owned by the Washington Post Company. (Despite being the namesake of the company, the Washington Post itself was not profitable at the time. The business relied on local broadcast stations to stay afloat.)

This is where Warren enters the story. He believed the Washington Post was undervalued, and in 1973, Berkshire Hathaway bought a 10 percent ownership share—enough to keep the company going while making sure that Kay remained in control. He eventually became a trusted advisor and a close friend to Kay, which I saw firsthand years later in Hood Canal.

Warren has always hated that Kay was left out of the movie All the President’s Men, which came out just two years after Nixon resigned and received great critical acclaim. Without her leadership and bravery, the Watergate scandal might have faded into obscurity. Fortunately, the film The Post gave Kay her proper due. Meryl Streep was even nominated for an Oscar for playing her.

There is so much to Kay’s story—including her time with President Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, and the pressmen’s strike—that I cannot mention all of it here. If you want to learn even more about her incredible life, I recommend starting with the new documentary Becoming Katharine Graham before reading Personal History.

Diving deep into Kay's extraordinary life is well worth your time. Her story offers more than just insights into a fascinating chapter of American history—it also reveals valuable lessons about courage, leadership, and finding strength in vulnerability.

If you’re a big reader, you can probably point to a book or two that changed the course of your life. For me, it was a 1997 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about diarrhea, which was killing three million kids a year.

At the time, I had wealth—and knew I planned to give it away—but no clear mission. Nick’s article gave me one. I faxed it to my dad with a note: “Maybe we can do something about this.”

That ended up setting the direction for what became the Gates Foundation. It didn’t just give us a what—it gave us a how. Nick’s reporting showed us that the biggest challenge in global health isn’t always discovering new breakthroughs. Often, it’s making sure the tools we already have—vaccines, medicines, bed nets, or oral rehydration therapies for rotavirus—reach every child, no matter where they’re born.

Reading Nick’s new memoir, Chasing Hope, brought me back to that moment and showed me how it fit into the bigger story of his life. The book is a deeply personal account of a life spent documenting injustice and refusing to look away, whether it’s genocide in Darfur, refugee camps in Sudan, or the streets of his hometown in rural Oregon.

Nick’s impulse to go where the suffering is, and to make people care, has defined his career. He’s reported from more than 150 countries, covering war, poverty, health, and human rights. He and his longtime collaborator and wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for their work. Together and individually, they’ve brought injustices around the world into view for millions of readers.

But Chasing Hope isn’t just a greatest-hits collection of his past reporting. It’s the story of how someone becomes Nick Kristof. He writes about growing up on a sheep and cherry farm in Oregon, driving tractors as a teenager, and nearly becoming a lawyer before deciding on journalism. He also reflects on the toll his career has taken on him, his family, and his capacity for hope.

I’ve known Nick for many years now, and I’ve admired his work since that 1997 rotavirus column. On paper, we don’t seem all that similar. He’s a journalist, I’m a technologist; he tells stories, I talk numbers. But reading Chasing Hope, I was struck by what we have in common: growing up in the Pacific Northwest, learning about the value of service from our parents, thinking globally.

We both attended Harvard and left early—me because I dropped out, him because he graduated in three years before heading to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. But neither of us ever stopped learning. I think we both believe the world’s pretty interesting if you remain a student.

Nick’s curiosity didn’t come out of nowhere, and neither did his sense of purpose. His mother was an art history professor and a civic leader who helped influence local politics. His father, a political science professor who fled both Nazism and communism, believed deeply in education and the responsibilities that come with freedom. That kind of upbringing left a mark on him and shaped the kind of journalist he became.

Over decades, he’s built a career reporting on crises that are often ignored because they happen in far-off places, far from centers of power. In Chasing Hope, he recounts his experiences chronicling river blindness in Ethiopia, maternal mortality in Cameroon, and malaria in Cambodia. Through the foundation, I mobilize science, data, and funding to address many of the same global challenges Nick reports on. Our approaches are different, but the underlying questions we ask (and try to answer) are the same: Why are some lives valued less than others? And how can we use the tools we have—information, resources, attention—to close that gap?

Nick has an admirable commitment to nuance, especially when it comes to hard subjects like China. Nick lived there for years, speaks Mandarin, and understands the country in a way most Western commentators don’t. I’ve always appreciated his ability to go beyond the headlines—and focus not just on what’s going wrong, but on what’s changing and why it matters.

Nick is also an optimist, which might sound strange given the kinds of suffering he writes about. But his work is grounded in a belief I share: The right data—or the right story—can move people to act. As Nick puts it, “A central job of a journalist is to get people to care about some problem that may seem remote.” People, when given the chance, want to make things better. Progress, while never guaranteed, is possible.

That optimism feels especially important, if increasingly difficult, right now. Isolationism is on the rise around the world, and governments are cutting back on foreign aid at the very moment when we should be doing more, not less. Millions of lives are at stake. Nick’s work reminds us what’s possible when we care about people beyond our own borders—and what happens when we don’t.

Chasing Hope made me think a lot about what kind of person chooses to run toward the hardest problems—and keep going back until they’re solved. It also made me think the world would be a much better place if there were more Nick Kristofs. In the meantime, we’re lucky to have this one.

I’ve always prided myself on my ability to teach myself things. Whenever I don’t know a lot about something, I’ll read a textbook or watch an online course until I do.

I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself—until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water. I was thrilled to sit down with her recently to talk about the book.

Tara was raised in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho. Her dad had very non-mainstream views about the government. He believed doomsday was coming, and that the family should interact with the health and education systems as little as possible. As a result, she didn’t step foot in a classroom until she was 17, and major medical crises went untreated (her mother suffered a brain injury in a car accident and never fully recovered).

Because Tara and her six siblings worked at their father’s junkyard from a young age, none of them received any kind of proper homeschooling. She had to teach herself algebra and trigonometry and self-studied for the ACT, which she did well enough on to gain admission to Brigham Young University. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in intellectual history from Cambridge University. (Full disclosure: she was a Gates Scholar, which I didn’t even know until I reached that part of the book.)

Educated is an amazing story, and I get why it’s spent so much time on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It reminded me in some ways of the Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country, which I recently watched. Both explore people who remove themselves from society because they have these beliefs and knowledge that they think make them more enlightened. Their belief systems benefit from their separateness, and you’re forced to be either in or out.

But unlike Wild, Wild Country—which revels in the strangeness of its subjects—Educated doesn’t feel voyeuristic. Tara is never cruel, even when she’s writing about some of her father’s most fringe beliefs. It’s clear that her whole family, including her mom and dad, is energetic and talented. Whatever their ideas are, they pursue them.

Of the seven Westover siblings, three of them—including Tara—left home, and all three have earned Ph.D.s. Three doctorates in one family would be remarkable even for a more “conventional” household. I think there must’ve been something about their childhood that gave them a degree of toughness and helped them persevere. Her dad taught the kids that they could teach themselves anything, and Tara’s success is a testament to that.

I found it fascinating how it took studying philosophy and history in school for Tara to trust her own perception of the world. Because she never went to school, her worldview was entirely shaped by her dad. He believed in conspiracy theories, and so she did, too. It wasn’t until she went to BYU that she realized there were other perspectives on things her dad had presented as fact. For example, she had never heard of the Holocaust until her art history professor mentioned it. She had to research the subject to form her own opinion that was separate from her dad’s.

Her experience is an extreme version of something everyone goes through with their parents. At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking they know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. I’m sad that Tara is estranged from a lot of her family because of this process, but the path she’s taken and the life she’s built for herself are truly inspiring.

When you meet her, you don’t have any impression of all the turmoil she’s gone through. She’s so articulate about the traumas of her childhood, including the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of one brother. I was impressed by how she talks so candidly about how naïve she once was—most of us find it difficult to talk about our own ignorance.

I was especially interested to hear her take on polarization in America. Although it’s not a political book, Educated touches on a number of the divides in our country: red states versus blue states, rural versus urban, college-educated versus not. Since she’s spent her whole life moving between these worlds, I asked Tara what she thought. She told me she was disappointed in what she called the “breaking of charity”—an idea that comes from the Salem witch trials and refers to the moment when two members of the same group break apart and become different tribes.

“I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant about,” she said. “I think education is really just a process of self-discovery—of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of [it] as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”

Tara’s process of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated. It’s the kind of book that I think everyone will enjoy, no matter what genre you usually pick up. She’s a talented writer, and I suspect this book isn’t the last we’ll hear from her. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I’m a longtime fan of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. When Jon Stewart stepped down as host in 2015, I was sad to see him go. I was also worried for his replacement, Trevor Noah, a South African comedian. Stewart’s style is so unusual that I didn’t see how anyone could fill his shoes—especially someone like Noah, who describes himself as an outsider. As popular as Noah was in South Africa, I didn’t know whether his humor would connect with American audiences.

I’m happy to report that I was wrong. Millions of viewers—myself included—are tuning in to The Daily Show because Noah’s show is every bit as good as Stewart’s. His humor has a lightness and optimism that’s refreshing to watch. What’s most impressive is how he uses his outside perspective to his advantage. He’s good at making fun of himself, America, and the rest of the world. His comedy is so universal that it has the power to transcend borders.

Reading Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, I quickly learned how Noah’s outsider approach has been honed over a lifetime of never quite fitting in. Born to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father in apartheid South Africa, he entered the world as a biracial child in a country where mixed race relationships were forbidden. Noah was not just a misfit, he was (as the title says) “born a crime.”

In South Africa, where race categories are so arbitrary and yet so prominent, Noah never had a group to call his own. As a little boy living under apartheid laws, he couldn’t be seen in public with his white father or his black mother. In public, his father would walk far ahead of him to ensure he wouldn’t be seen with his biracial son. His mother would pose as a maid to make it look like she was just babysitting another family’s child. On the schoolyard, he didn’t fit in with the white kids or the black kids or the kids who were “colored” (the term used in South Africa to describe people of mixed race).

But during his childhood, he quickly discovered that there’s a freedom that comes with being a misfit. A polyglot who speaks English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Tsonga, Tswana, as well as German and Spanish, Noah used his talent for language to bounce from group to group and win acceptance from all of them. One of my favorite stories in the book involves Noah walking down the street when he overhears a group of men speaking in Zulu about how they were plotting to mug “this white guy.” Noah realizes they were referring to him. Noah spins around and announces in perfect Zulu that they should all mug someone together. The Zulu men are startled that Noah speaks Zulu and a tense situation is defused. Noah is immediately accepted as one of their own.

Again and again throughout his childhood, he discovered that language was more powerful than skin color in building connections with other people. “I became a chameleon,” Noah writes. “My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

Much of Noah’s story of growing up in South Africa is tragic. His Swiss father moves away. His family is desperately poor. He’s arrested. And in the most shocking moment, his mother is shot by his stepfather. Yet in Noah’s hands, these moving stories are told in a way that will often leave you laughing. His skill for comedy is clearly inherited from his mother. Even after she’s shot in the face, and miraculously survives, she tells her son from her hospital bed to look at the bright side. “’Now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family,’” she jokes.

In fact, Noah’s mother emerges as the real hero of the book. She’s an extraordinary person who is fiercely independent and raised her son to be the same way. Her greatest gift was to give her son the ability to think for himself and see the world from his own perspective. “If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind,” he writes. Like many fans of Noah’s, I am thankful she did. 

When Paul Hewson was 11, his parents sent him to a Dublin grammar school that happened to have an outstanding boys’ choir. Paul, who later took the nickname Bono, loved singing. His father had a beautiful voice, and Paul thought he might have some of his dad’s talent. But when the principal asked him if he wanted to join the choir, his mom jumped in before he could answer. “Not at all,” she said. “Paul has no interest in singing.”

Bono’s new book, Surrender, is packed with funny, poignant moments like this. Even though I’m a big fan of U2, and Bono and I have become friends over the years—Paul Allen connected us in the early 2000s—a lot of those stories were new to me. I went into this book knowing almost nothing about his anger at his father, the band’s near-breakups, and his discovery that his cousin was actually his half-brother. I didn’t even know that he grew up with a Protestant mom and Catholic dad.

I loved Surrender. You get to observe the band in the process of creating some of their most iconic songs. The book is filled with clever, self-deprecating lines like “Just how effective can a singer with anger issues be in the cause of nonviolence?” And you’ll learn a lot about the challenges he dealt with in his campaigns for debt relief and HIV treatment in Africa. (The Gates Foundation is a major supporter of ONE, the nonprofit that Bono helped start.)

In this passage, he explains how a boy from the suburbs of Dublin became a global phenomenon: “There are only a few routes to making a grandstanding stadium singer out of a small child. You can tell them they’re amazing, that the world needs to hear their voice, that they must not hide their ‘genius under a bushel.’ Or you can just plain ignore them. That might be more effective. The lack of interest of my father, a tenor, in his son’s voice is not easy to explain, but it might have been crucial.” (It also helped that he has, as he later learned from a doctor, freakishly large lung capacity.)

Bono’s loyalty to his bandmates, and their loyalty to him, is pretty incredible. My favorite illustration from the book takes place at a concert in Arizona, when the band was urging the then-governor to uphold the national MLK Day holiday in his state. U2’s security team picked up a credible threat to Bono’s life if the band played their Martin Luther King tribute “Pride (In the Name of Love).” “It wasn’t just melodrama,” he writes, “when I closed my eyes and sort of half kneeled to disguise the fact that I was fearful to sing the rest of the words.” When Bono opened his eyes, he saw that bassist Adam Clayton had moved in front of him to shield him like a Secret Service agent. Fortunately, the threat never materialized.

There’s another factor that explains the band’s tight bonds: They share the same values. All four of them are passionate about fighting poverty and inequity in the world, and they’re also aligned on maintaining their integrity as artists. I learned this the hard way. When Microsoft wanted to license U2’s song “Beautiful Day” for an ad campaign, I joined a call in an attempt to persuade the band to go for the deal. They simply weren’t interested. I admired their commitment.

While Bono never got lost in drugs or alcohol, he acknowledges that stardom gave him a big ego. He also says that he had a “need to be needed.” His key to survival was embracing the concept of spiritual surrender, as the title of the book suggests. He eventually came to see that he’d never fill his emotional needs by playing for huge crowds or being a global advocate. His faith in a higher power helped him a lot. So did his wife, Ali. He writes that when his mom died during his childhood, his home “stopped being a home; it was just a house.” Ali and their four children gave him a home once again.

Bono writes that his surrender is still incomplete. He’s not going to retire anytime soon, which is great news and not just for U2 fans. After the past few years, the field of global health—one of his chief causes—needs an injection of energy and passion. Bono’s unique gifts are perfectly suited to that mission.