Engineering news
Bill Gates has called on engineers to develop innovations to help improve the lives of the world's poorest people. He said there was a need for devices that can generate low-cost energy without emitting carbon dioxide, for equipment to refrigerate vaccines in remote areas, and new materials that can be used to improve living conditions in urban slums.
Speaking at the Global Grand Challenges Summit in London, he said: “For helping out the poor, we need quite a few things. We still have tens of thousands of children who die because the vaccine supply chain doesn't have the right tools.”
Seven million children die each year before they reach their fifth birthday, and in many cases their diseases could have been prevented by vaccination. In remote areas of the developing world vaccines against diseases such as measles and rotavirus are not available because there is no electricity to keep vaccine vials refrigerated.
Gates said that it will be engineers who solve this problem and that with the correct tools and other innovations it is “absolutely possible” to get child mortality below three million by 2030.
Also on Gates' wish list for public health is a drug depot that can sit under the skin and gradually leak out drugs that treat tuberculosis, for example, over a 60-day timescale. In the developing world people may not live close to a clinic and find it difficult to keep visiting for continued treatment, so medicines fail, he explained.
He said: “In almost every disease there are things that go well beyond the normal bounds of biology that we would like to see that would have a huge difference.” For malaria, a laser shooting type device that can kill mosquitoes would be a key tool in disease eradication, he suggested.
Outside the medical field, Gates said that the “grand challenge” for engineers is to develop a device that can provide low-cost power without emitting carbon dioxide. He added: “This is something that needs to be solved very quickly. We don't have the luxury of simply waiting until something comes along.”
He explained that climate change is a serious issue and the world's poorest people have agriculture that is always on the edge of viability because of drought and flood. “They are the ones who will feel the pain of this, which is ironic and unjust because they are not the ones who have contributed to it at all,” he said.
As the world's population increases, materials science will become ever more important, he said.
The global population is expected to swell to nine billion by 2050 and many people will live in urban slums. New materials that can provide better shelter, heating, lighting and air conditioning are needed to improve the living conditions that exist today in these areas.
Gates said: “Those are basic engineering problems: what are the materials, how do you make it inexpensive? There are so many engineering problems there.”
He said he was optimistic about the progress that science and engineering will make in the years ahead. “When everybody says something is unsolvable they have not really thought through innovation and the role it can play.
“If you think about where we have come in the last 100 years, it's science and engineering that has gotten us so far.
“This positive message of what engineering has been able to achieve is one that we do not talk about enough,” he said.