Bill Gates's foundation expands its influence on global health, for better or worse
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Before I share my new work, I want to make a recommendation: Avoid AI overviews, and beware the outputs of chatbots! They’re often inaccurate or incomplete, and there’s preliminary evidence that their use can affect people’s critical thinking skills. If a question’s worth asking, look into the answer yourself. And when it comes to news, if you want reliable information and stories that humans actually found worthwhile to write themselves, then read and subscribe to newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. (It’s also nonetheless true that some newsrooms are rolling out their own unreliable AI products, and I hope they realize their mistake.)
The Gates Foundation’s Global Reach Expands, to Mixed Reviews
While previously reporting on President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and calls for reform, I found out that the Gates Foundation was poised to become the top funder of the WHO, providing more funding than China, Germany, the UK, or any other country. That means the Gates Foundation wields influence on the WHO’s priorities, and it influences global health policy in other ways as well, just as it influences US education policy. So while Trump is cutting much of the US’s investments in global health and foreign aid, the Gates Foundation is filling some of that power vacuum. And I decided to investigate and write about this in my new piece for Undark magazine.
All this “philanthrocapitalism” comes with a cost. For one thing, the Gates Foundation is less transparent than any federal agency, and it isn’t publicly accountable in the way that governments are. The foundation’s endowment dwarfs the GDP of many of the countries it operates in, especially in Africa. It also provides funding to many nonprofits, universities, and newsrooms, which at first might seem like a good thing, until you realize that it makes people reluctant to criticize the foundation, and it’s hard for anyone to promulgate alternative approaches or agendas for global health.
In other writing…
Vera Rubin’s Legacy Lives On in a Troubled Scientific Landscape, an excellent New York Times story by Katrina Miller. (If you’re interested in more, check out my writing about Rubin the astronomer and Rubin the telescope.)
The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms, a feature by Henry Wismayer in Noema magazine
Strata, Laura Poppick’s evocatively written new book about deep time and the natural history of Earth
Snake Venom, Urine, and a Quest to Live Forever: Inside a Biohacking Conference Emboldened by MAHA, by Will Bahr in WIRED
The Parrot in the Machine, an engaging New York Review of Books essay by James Gleick, where he takes on AI industry hype
The Wild Within the Walls, a story by Krista Langlois in bioGraphic magazine about urban wildlife coexisting in Rome
Homo crustaceous, an entertaining essay by Michael Garfield in Aeon magazine that’s basically about “everything becomes crab” memes
What I’m reading: The Poison Squad, a book about food safety efforts during the time of Upton Sinclair, by science writer Deborah Blum
Looking back: In 2017 after Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, I wrote in Slate about how FEMA’s flood maps don’t sufficiently account for climate changes or increasing development in vulnerable areas. Unfortunately, this problem persists today.
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More about me: I’m a science writer, editor, and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Bluesky and Twitter. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.