Scientific quests: Better bananas, nicer mosquitoes

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York Times

Published: December 10, 2005, 8:00 AM PST

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Addressing 275 of the world's most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke:

"I've been applying my imagination to the synergies of this," he said. "We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold."

They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world's richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.



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Their deadly serious proposals--answers to the Grand Challenges in Global Health that Gates posed in a 2003 speech in Davos, Switzerland--sounded much like his spoofs: laboratories around the world, some of them led by Nobel Prize winners, proposing to invent bananas and sorghum that make their own vitamin A; chemicals that render mosquitoes unable to smell humans; drugs that hunt down tuberculosis germs in people who do not even know they are infected; and vaccines that are mixed into spores or plastics or sugars and can be delivered in glasses of orange juice or modified goose calls.

What Gates had outlined at Davos were the greatest obstacles facing doctors in the tropics: Laboratories are few and far between. Vaccines spoil without refrigeration and require syringes, which can transmit AIDS. Mosquitoes develop resistance to all insecticides. Crops that survive in the jungle or desert often have little nutritive value. Infections outwit powerful drugs by lying dormant.

His offer--originally $200 million, raised to $450 million after 1,600 proposals came in--"was to make sure that innovation wasn't reserved just for big-ticket items like cancer and heart disease," said Carol A. Dahl, the foundation's director of global health technologies, who ran the conference.

The winning teams, which were named in June, came from as far away as Australia and China, with research partners all over Africa and Southeast Asia. Over three days in a Seattle hotel, the 43 team leaders delivered 10-minute summaries of their plans, quizzed foundation officials about details of the grants and discussed possible ethical quandaries with bioethicists from the University of Toronto.

(The most common questions were about the one ironclad rule: Grantees may patent anything they discover, but must make it available cheaply to poor countries. An ethical concern common to many projects is that they will eventually require clinical trials on impoverished Africans or Asians with little understanding of informed consent.)

In the hallways and over cocktails and dinners--all paid for by the foundation--virologists and neurologists talked with plant biologists and nanoparticle physicists, sometimes finding ways to help one another. For example, a scientist with plans to improve vitamin-fortified "golden rice" asked the designer of a hand-held laboratory to test blood for pathogens whether it could be modified to test blood for iron and vitamins.

Eighty percent of these are likely to be dead ends. But even if we have a 10 percent hit rate, it will all have been worthwhile.

--Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft

Gates, in an interview, sidestepped a request to name his favorite projects. "Oh, I love all my children," he said.

But he remained brutally realistic about where his "children"--and the money he lavishes on them--were likely to end up. "Eighty percent of these are likely to be dead ends," he said. "But even if we have a 10 percent hit rate, it will all have been worthwhile."

What follows is a selection of the winning projects.

Dried vaccines
The only scientist to emit a goose honk during his presentation was Robert E. Sievers, who was illustrating inexpensive straws with useful vibrations.

Sievers, the chief executive of Aktiv-Dry, a Colorado company that turns liquids into superfine powders, is trying to develop a measles vaccine that can be stored dry and inhaled.

He proposed turning it into glassy particles around a matrix of trehalose, the sugar that allows brine shrimp cysts to survive dried out for years but hatch into wriggling creatures in seawater. (The shrimp are perhaps better known as the "amazing live sea monkeys" advertised in comic books.)

CONTINUED: Spore delivery...
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Mosquitoes that cure

Ian Morris Dec 11, 2005, 4:11 PM PST

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