Top 1132 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Gates - Page 19

Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, "Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?" People don't forget that.

Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence.

We're in a period of uncertainty about [Donald Trump] administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.

AIDS we're - most of these diseases - we are down from the peak. We're down about 40 per cent from the peak and if we got the right vaccines, which are at the early stage of discovering, then the numbers would come down very dramatically. So that's why we talk about it as an emergency.

The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it.

Hopefully, whether it's energy or child vaccines, the case of the many benefits helping countries so that they are stable, so these refugee problems that have been troubling for Europe - a little less so for the U.S. but, even so, a lot of controversy there - these things are why the future's going to be better than the past. People really do look to the United States, so we'll be there making the case.

If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we're making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights.

In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I'm putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.

Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.

Thinking about impact on children meant adding to the agenda, both the R&D agenda and the delivery agenda, but it's amazing news, even in the scale of other tragedies.

I think there's even a chance that [R&D and innovation budgets] might be increased [during Donald Trump Administration] and we should go and make that case to the executive branch, to the Congress.

As we have taken diarrhea and pneumonia down, even malaria down quite a bit, the portion of the days that are very early in that 5 years - the first month, the first day - it's about half now. Yet that's the part we understand the least.

R&D generally has been a bipartisan thing, because in the IT space, in the medical space, the U.S., the benefits to ourselves and the world and our economy have been very, very clear. I'm hopeful we can make a very strong case there. Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.

That it's a worldwide thing that families are better off.

I would certainly use my voice to try and avoid anything that undermines confidence, so that parents are using vaccines fully.

My innovation message, specifically including energy, happened to be the same week that on Monday and Tuesday I announced the Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then on that Tuesday afternoon, in December, was when I sat down with him. I explained the US has great science here, this is where the market for these things is going to be. It connects to less pollution, it connects to U.S. jobs, it connects to security, not needing the energy coming from far away.

Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved.

I was announcing to the public, in 2006, that I'd be leaving Microsoft in a couple of years and focusing full-time on the foundation. That was the time at which we went back to New York and Warren [Buffett] announced these gifts to a number of foundations, with a very high percentage of it going to us and basically doubling our capacity.

The scientific understanding of some of these [childhood] diseases is advancing quite rapidly. There's some things like premature birth or nutrition, first day deaths that we need a lot more insights so that we can build the tools to solve those problems.

The market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the government to do the right things.

With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.

Scientists and companies weren't creating things like new vaccines. Now that we have this fund that's there to buy at the lowest price, but buy for those people these medicines, we see scientists everywhere coming up with those new tools.

I have this very positive view of the world getting better and better. The list of things that could be huge setbacks is not very long: A nuclear war, climate change and epidemics.

Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us.

We're very enthused about the idea that in the third trimester we actually give the mother a vaccine and her antibodies, the protective things that the immune system makes, actually pass through to the baby, both when the baby is born, and through the mother's milk. Because the baby's immune system is actually not very strong for that first few months, using the mother's immune system to do this - it's a very exciting idea and something that we're investing heavily in.

[Africa] is the one continent where you still have a lot more young people than old people. So making sure they're healthy, good nutrition, good education. That'll be important for the world.

You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs.

We have completely eradicated smallpox; we have almost eradicated polio. That's the miracle of vaccines, which is even greater than that of antibiotics.

We got a malaria initiative, really a phenomenal time, even though in the early stages there was some uncertainty. Then of course [Barack] Obama, although he had budget constraints, he believed in these things; a lot of new initiatives, including in agriculture.

Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.

The U.S. and Canada are two generous governments and we reach out and partner with anyone who believes in foreign aid.

Talking to mothers, always brings it home because they're so anxious to do everything they can for their kids and so tragic for them.

Even in some of our vaccine areas, like an AIDS vaccine, things have taken longer than we expected, but we have the pipeline of tools. The biological information that we have that gives us insights is fantastic.

Microsoft has some assets like Office that have stayed strong and there's so much room for innovation in those.

We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success.

Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people.

We have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan - again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of [polio] cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.

Going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk - I was with young girls in south Africa - understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them.

President [George] Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy.

Something like Windows is still an unbelievable asset but because the world is somewhat phone-centric, it's an asset that has to be managed very carefully to make sure that it's extended, and there are very interesting things that are being done with that.

In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

In 1990, one in 10 children died before the age of five. That's now down to one in 20, and vaccines were the single biggest factor in that. Had it stayed at 10 percent, 122 million more children would have died.

It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died.

People in business understand paying money to be more efficient. You can bootstrap markets where the devices are too expensive at first because these are so valuable to some people.

The US spends more on energy R&D than all other countries put together, and I personally consider it quite inadequate.

With polio, we've gone several years with no polio in all of Africa, but now with this we're having to go and mop up in that whole region, so it's a bit of a setback for polio. So in parallel we have to go back and get rid of those cases.

There is this broad, broad recognition of how technology is enabling new things. Companies that never paid attention to computers in any form now see digital technology as creating threats and opportunities for them.

We need to cooperate globally on epidemic preparedness and prevention in the same way we are cooperating globally to stop people from getting nuclear weapons.

Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.

I have not met [Donald] Trump and discussed any issues with him. There have been Republican administrations like the [George] Bush administration who initiated this AIDS generosity. So it's not purely a right-left thing.

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.