Key quote: “Listen to people when they disagree with you”
High Network Individual; For Larry Brilliant, ending plagues and providing energy is about information flow.
Forbes, 16 Mar
A lifetime of building social and technology connections has taught Lawrence Brilliant a lot about using networks to make better luck. Now an “evangelist” at Google’s philanthropic arm, he figures the right networking can find and stop the next pandemic before it kills millions. “Out of 57 million deaths a year, about 15 million are from communicable diseases,” he says. “We can attack that with better information flow and better diagnostics.”
Trained at Wayne State and the University of Michigan as a physician and an epidemiologist, Brilliant sees a near-certainty that another AIDS, ebola or bird flu is coming, likely caused by human-animal interaction. About 40 such diseases have arisen in the last three decades, rapidly transported by our mobile society. His work on both the eradication of smallpox and the development of the Internet tells him how to stem it: “We have to get close to the origin, with very high specificity.”
The 64-year-old Brilliant arrived at his present station after a diverse career in everything from ridding the world of smallpox and restoring the sight of millions of the globe’s poorest to building one of the first online communities. He was the doctor on a rock tour and for several years a student in an ashram in India, where he made friends with a young Steve Jobs. The diversity redounds in his personal life. Brilliant’s guru was a Hindu who had his students study the New and Old Testaments, plus the Koran. His cramped office at Google.org boasts psychedelic posters, medical texts and awards from aid groups, along with a statue of the elephant-god Ganesh, in Hinduism the Remover of Obstacles (with a rotund belly to match Brilliant’s own).
[See "Re-engineering Google.org" for the latest Brilliant move.]
An ability to cross boundaries is a valuable skill in the Internet age. Google.org gets 1% of Google’s equity and profits and a like amount of time from 20,000 Google employees. Brilliant, who ran that unit of the company until its management was subsumed within Google’s business development office, pushed it into disease eradication, alongside somewhat more commercially flavored investments in causes like renewable energy. The latter is possible only because Google.org is purposely not structured as a typical foundation. “Other foundations can give money, but we want to access all the keys of the keyboard,” he says. “The key is these game-changing collaborative tools.”
Google’s founders have a passion for saving the planet from carbon. So Google.org is promoting geothermal power. A Google engineer built software that combines known geothermal resources with Google’s own map of the world. Another engineer recently came up with Flu Trends, a service that determines flu outbreaks in the U.S. by scanning the searches people make for flu-related topics. Google’s antipoverty work centers on spreading information access, from Internet connections to legal rights.
As evangelist for these projects, Brilliant is supposed to inspire engineers, government groups and medical researchers. The audience may be impoverished health ministries and for-profit drugmakers, Silicon Valley billionaires or rural imams. “Larry creates an emotional response to problems, so people can see where they fit in for solving it,” says Louise Gresham, director of the NTI Global Health & Security Initiative, one of the groups involved with Google.org in spotting bird flu outbreaks in Southeast Asia’s Mekong region. “The vision is not just about getting a single outcome, but getting a mass of people involved in health security for the survival of the planet.”
The Mekong project involves cooperation of the governments of China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma (alias Myanmar), many of which have recent histories of conflict. Several nonprofits are also involved, including NTI, which provides lab diagnostics, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which originally funded the project. Google.org gave money to NTI for the labs and has built up e-mail and blogging-type communications services among the players.
Google is also interested in scanning newspapers for reported disease outbreaks, a technique that has proved valuable in countries whose health authorities instinctively suppress information about epidemics. Information is flowing more freely now. Health workers recently shared data to isolate a Laotian woman who had traveled into Thailand with flu. She was treated, and workers learned who she might have infected–and that she did not have a new, more communicable form of the virus.
Google is funding similar disease-finding projects in Africa and looking at investments in private U.S. biotech companies that could speed disease identification. Google.org also paid to produce a film that profiled a traditional Muslim woman in India who vaccinates children against polio, after conservative religious leaders began denouncing the vaccine as a U.S. plot to sterilize them. The film sped inoculations.
The polio campaign, which has involved 20 million people, mostly volunteers, is a larger version of the smallpox effort that got Brilliant into epidemiology. Trained as a surgeon, he developed parathyroid cancer just before his residency. While recovering from surgery, he helped deliver a baby on Alcatraz Island, when Native Americans occupied the former prison in 1969. That led to the stint as medical groupie on the Medicine Ball Caravan rock tour, his involvement in a half-baked concert film that came out in 1971 and then his first trip to India. Along the way he collected medicine for victims of a cyclone in East Bengal. He stayed at a guru’s ashram in India for the next three years, studying and worshipping in the presence of his teacher. “I never would have left,” he says.
One day the guru told him that his mission was to eradicate smallpox. “He told me, ‘This disease must be pulled up by the roots,’” Brilliant recalls. The unshaven hippie rode 17 hours to Delhi and was turned away from a United Nations health office. His guru sent him back. A dozen tries and a visit to the barber later, Brilliant became recruit number three of the World Health Organization’s eradication campaign in India. Some 150,000 people across India eventually labored to find and inoculate people against smallpox. “Babies died in my arms. We kept going.” He was there when India’s last known case was found in a remote rural village.
What to do next? Afterward, he and other veterans started the Seva Foundation, dedicated to identifying and treating the causes of blindness in poor countries. Steve Jobs had by that time started Apple Computer, and gave Apple’s twelfth machine for use in Nepal. With surveillance and public health awareness, Seva (which means “service” in Hindi) has, it says, cured blindness in 2 million people.
In 1985 Brilliant teamed with counterculture icon Stewart Brand to form the Well, or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, a kind of online salon of artists and thinkers that is still in business. Brilliant also ran a prepaid calling card business, a Wi-Fi provider and Internet services company called Cometa and an unsuccessful conferencing software firm called Neti Technologies.
The Google connection came about after Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin heard a Brilliant lecture on early disease detection. Brilliant sees the convergence of his experience in networks, technology and disease eradication in mystic terms. “It’s hard to talk about, but fate is malleable, not deterministic. Experience and humility can open you up to the trajectories of time–you see certain things and know they are right. I was certain the Well was right. . . . My only big mistakes come from certainty about myself.”
He goes on: “Great ideas will not come from sitting around thinking by yourself. They will come from important conversations between the public and private sectors, often with people who normally disagree. Listen to people when they disagree with you.”
Read Forbes Editor William Baldwin’s Side Lines On This Story.
