Excerpt of good Bill Gates article in Forbes- Matt Jones

Matt Jones is the successful lawyer who created the Kentucky Sports Radio blog for dedicated University of Kentucky fans like myself -http://www.kentuckysportsradio.com/ .  He is in the infancy of a successful radio career as well.  His blog normally starts with a piece other than strictly sports.  He is of a different political philosophy than me, but I can accept that because of his good coverage of the Kentuckty wildcats.

SamKat aka Sam Kegley

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Bill Gates’s Monday News and Views

by Matt Jones @ 10:43 pm. Filed under Blue Blooded Opinions





I usually spend Sundays attempting to do as little related to sports as possible. Most of the time that means a great deal of reading, and today that led me to this Forbes’ piece on the charitable work of Bill Gates.. In case you missed it this week, Gates was named the fifth powerful man in the world (behind Obama, Putin, Jintao and Merkel) and #1 in the private sector, by Forbes magazine. Instead of the usual profile on Gates’s success with Microsoft and revolutionary work in the computer field, Forbes instead looked at what he hopes to become his future legacy. The William and Melinda Gates Foundation is simply put, possibly the most remarkable act of charitable giving in the history of humankind. Gates has given billions of dollars through the foundation and Forbes notes that if not for the giving, he would be far and away the richest man in the world. Instead he has chosen to use his money to fight problems around the world, most specifically to spread the use of vaccines to fight the world’s deadliest and most lingering diseases. His work has spread affordable vaccine use for children throughout the world and has already seen tremendous impact on measles, hepatitis B, whooping cough, rotavirus and AIDS. His work is now also focused on malaria and his personal goal of ridding the world of polio, which would be only the second disease (along with smallpox) eradicated from the planet Earth. The impact of Gates’s charity, focus and determination is virtually unfathomable and his work will see tens of millions of children’s lives saved. His secondary impact, the human work that has followed his innovative technological brilliance can best be summed up from the final paragraph of the Forbes profile:



When I asked Gates to grade himself on which of his accomplishments—computer software or inoculations— was more important, his calculating mind whirled straight into action. “I’d say, it’s pretty hard to make that comparison,” he says. “In terms of lives saved, vaccines would just totally win out.” Then he ponders some more. Both vaccines and personal computers, he says, rank “right up there with the printing press and fire.” On its face, an astoundingly hubristic statement. But Gates says it without even a hint of braggadocio. It’s just cold, hard, reasoned fact.