Fantastic article. While I believe that WHO does a phenomenal job in maintaining a high level of public health standards for all nations, let's face it...it's still a bureaucracy. We know bureaucracies are mostly slow, and for the large part inefficient since there are no "market solutions". But with a NGO structured like the Gates Foundation (more a for-profit business model than the typical NGO), it is driven by the market...there is a supply and demand for better health systems, addressing public health concerns, and cutting edge research.

While the Gates Foundation may appear monopolistic, in the sector of non-profits, I think it encourages more, generous philanthropy and competition -- isn't that better for non-profits in the end? After all, one of the biggest downfalls of non-profits, and reasons why many of them wither away is that they are bad managers of monetary and human resources, thereby making them less efficient.

Quoted: The audacity of the Gates Foundation may have unintended consequences, but things would be worse if UN bureaucracies still dominated the field

Quoted: Presents the results of a study that examined the success of international efforts to rebuild public health and health care delivery in seven cases: Germany and Japan immediately after World War II; Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo in the 1990s; and Afghanistan...

dotting to remember. want to read this eventually...seems interesting and in my line of future work.

Quoted: The seemingly uncontroversial goal of insuring more children has become the focus of an ideological conflict between the White House and Congress.

Quoted: Somewhere in your brain, there's a cupcake circuit. how it works is not entirely clear, and you couldn't see it even if you knew where to look. But it's there all the same—and it's a powerful thing. You didn't pop out of the womb prewired for cupcakes, but long ago, early in your babyhood, you got your first taste of one, and instantly a series of sensory, metabolic and neurochemical fireworks went off. Human beings have always had a complicated relationship with food. Staying alive from day to day requires our bodies to keep a lot of systems running just so, but most of them—circulatory, respiratory, neurological, endocrine—operate automatically. Eating is different. Like sex, it's a voluntary thing. And like sex, it's a sine qua non to keep the species going. So nature cleverly rigs the game, making sure we pursue them both by making sure we can't resist them. In the case of food, that has lately spelled trouble. Human history has usually been characterized by too little to eat rather than too much. Nature never planned for what could happen when unchecked appetites were suddenly matched by unchecked resources. But we're seeing it now.

Quoted: Until now it was not known whether eggs obtained in this way could survive thawing to be fertilised.

promising

this is great news