Silver Bullets, Grand Challenges and the New Philanthropy

Key to the latter is the principle of ‘blending’ the values and contributions of different sectors, so that the Foundations’ traditional role of ‘correcting for’ the market is transformed to one of ‘connecting to’ the market. [...] Incorporating Diptheria, Tetanus and Pertussis (DTP), BCG, polio and measles vaccines, the programme built on the earlier ‘miraculous’ success of the Salk polio vaccine in controlling the ravaging polio epidemics of the 1940s and 50s, at least in industrialised countries, and on the worldwide smallpox eradication campaigns from the 1960s until 1979 when the world was declared smallpox-free. [...] Hailed in the late 1940s as the key to eliminating the scourge of malaria, and used by the WHO in a massive global eradication campaign through the 1950s and 1960s, it was banned in the US in 1972 as a human carcinogen which had had a disastrous impact on the natural environment. [...] These two developments converged in the philanthropic sector: The rhetoric of the New Democrats and the practices of Silicon Valley were ultimately wed in the field of philanthropy, and the result was what is now generally termed ‘venture philanthropy’. [...] This process is intensified by the concentration of influence in the private philanthropic sector (discussed in the previous section of this paper) – a sector increasingly deferential to the largest of the ‘philanthro- capitalists’, the BMGF.