Bill Gates and Lawrence Ellison have long been rivals - for title of world's richest man, top software innovator, savviest corporate operator.
But in the realm of philanthropy, the founders of Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. are working in unspoken tandem, putting large chunks of their sizable wealth toward defeating some of the world's most intractable diseases.
As their charitable foundations have grown in the past few years, the titans of technology have brought about what scientists describe as a profound shift: prompting drug companies, governments and other philanthropists to spend money fighting overlooked diseases such as malaria, and encouraging young researchers to pursue experiments once looked upon as professional dead ends.
"I would say, at least from the perspective of researchers, that they have literally transformed the landscape," said Alfred Sommer, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University, which has received money from both.
Gates and Ellison are not the first captains of industry to tackle such global health problems. John D. Rockefeller created a foundation that tried to eradicate malaria, along with a host of other diseases, in the early 20th century.
The Rockefeller Foundation is still active in global health work, and is sponsoring a conference in September that is to include representatives from the Gates and Ellison foundations - the first time the groups founded by business rivals will formally attempt to coordinate their efforts.
In style and scale, the institutions born of the computer billionaires are as different as the men themselves.
Gates, 45, a married father of two, is known as a studious tactician who reads voraciously and works long hours despite his riches. Ellison, 57, is his scrappy challenger - known for his salesmanship, love of beautiful women and risk-taking in sports and business. He's also known for taking shots at Gates, including helping to lead the charge in recent years that Microsoft was an illegal monopoly.
For Gates, health is only a part of a philanthropic program that also includes minority scholarships, library technology and the creation of small high schools. For Ellison, medical research is at the heart of his philanthropy; his foundation is the largest private source of funding for the study of aging.
The $23.1 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest in the world, commands a building overlooking Seattle's gleaming Lake Union. Its Web site features polished photography and text to tell the story of Gates money at work. Just to keep up with the legal requirement that foundations give away 5 percent of their assets each year, the organization must dispense more than $3 million a day.
The Ellison Medical Foundation, in contrast both with Gates and with the profile of its flamboyant founder, operates quietly from a suite of an office building in Bethesda, a few blocks from the National Institutes of Health. It has a staff of four, leaving the duty of spokesman to executive director Dr. Richard Sprott, an expert in the biology of aging hired from the National Institute on Aging in 1998. Rather than launching programs, it funds the work of researchers in two areas - aging and deadly infectious diseases including malaria and tuberculosis - in which government money has been relatively lacking.
"What's particularly hard to fund is basic biological research, because your average U.S. congressman doesn't believe his constituents die of basic biology - which they do," Sprott said.
"What NIH does, it does extremely well," he said. "What they're not able to do as well is fund the high-risk stuff. Ellison made his money taking risks, and we're able to take those risks."
The foundation has no endowment. When moved to do so, Ellison - whose wealth has been cut in half during the past year by the turbulent stock market - writes a check. He has pledged to spend up to $45 million a year (Gates averages that much in two weeks) for the next few years, paying for 80 scholars at a time to pursue experiments that government sources won't support. Informally, he has discussed with Sprott and others eventually spending $100 million a year.
Ellison's scholars are chosen by an advisory board of six scientists. The group's chairman is Joshua Lederberg, a scientific pioneer who discovered genetic recombination of bacteria.
The billionaire playboy and the Nobel laureate began an unlikely friendship a decade ago, when Lederberg gave a lecture at Stanford University about the potential of using computers to solve problems in laboratory experiments. Ellison, who once planned to go to medical school, was in the audience.
A year later, when the scientist was back in town, he had lunch with Ellison, who invited him to stay at the $40 million Japanese-style villa he had constructed in the Silicon Valley town of Atherton. Ellison was so interested in the scientist's research that he worked as an assistant in Lederberg's laboratory for two weeks.
"He's quite a fan about molecular biology, and he pumped me dry about what was happening," Lederberg said. "I stressed to Larry that it would be great to have a foundation really founded on the notion of creativity."
Gates has said that he founded his health philanthropy on a different principle - to improve access to tools such as vaccines and basic nutrition that could prevent diseases flourishing in the Third World. A number of nongovernmental health organizations have swelled with Gates money, making such tools more plentiful and attracting the interest of government and private industry.
"For 36 years, people have been talking about public-private partnerships," said Barry Bloom, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, which has received money from Gates to run a large-scale AIDS-prevention program in Nigeria. "I have yet to see one on a real scale, until the Gates foundation."
Also at Harvard, researchers are using Ellison money to study groups of people who have lived to be older than 100, examining whether they share a gene that causes longevity. Bloom, who sits on Ellison's scientific advisory board, calls the work of the two foundations "extraordinarily complementary."
Approaches differ
At times, though, their philosophies - one focused on basic science, the other on public-health programs - might seem at odds.
Gates' focus is twofold. On one hand, his foundation is improving access to existing medical tools - vaccines and treatments that are prohibitively expensive and hard to get in the Third World. Gates also has promoted the development of vaccines for malaria and AIDS, reasoning that though such advances might be years away, they are a surer bet for saving lives than depending on scientific breakthroughs to cure or wipe out those diseases.
Ellison's Sprott disagrees with that approach. "We sort of see it the other way," he said. With vaccines, "you're always playing catch-up. If you put more money into basic research, you understand where this stuff is coming from."
But Gates might branch out further into basic science. His foundation recently hired Dr. Richard D. Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute, to run the foundation's global health program. Observers say Klausner's addition should add a key scientific underpinning to the organization's work.
"I know that he will in whatever he does add an extraordinary degree of scientific credibility to it," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a colleague of Klausner's.
Convergence possible
Another NIH colleague, Dr. Gerald T. Keusch, associate director for international research, predicted that in time the approaches of the two foundations will begin to dovetail, with Gates becoming more involved in basic science and Ellison in public health.
Lincoln Chen, director of the global equity initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, said the billionaires' differ- ent approaches bode well for solving the riddle of disease.
"Both are very legitimate views, and I think it is the job of foundations to move those agendas forward," Chen said. "It's a welcome and refreshing phase, not only for global health but philanthropy as well."
How much the organizations coordinate their work remains to be seen. The goal of the conference in September, Sprott said, is to ensure that efforts aren't duplicated.
Joe Cerrell, director of public affairs for the Gates foundation, said the organization welcomes philanthropic collaborators. "The challenges of addressing global health inequity are so great that we are interested in looking at any and all potential partnerships in dealing with what we see as a really severe issue," he said.
The rival philanthropists have already had common interests.
When an anonymous donor - speculated to be New York City mayor and Hopkins alumnus Michael R. Bloomberg - gave $100 million to create an institute to study malaria at the Hopkins School of Public Health a year ago, Sommer received calls from the Gates and the Ellison foundations the same day, inquiring about the gift. After their conversation, the Ellison foundation paid for an international symposium on malaria at the school.
The calls impressed Sommer, who said both billionaires were paying attention to what was happening in health philanthropy.
"There's also on both their parts a real commitment to getting other people into it, so it's not like they want to own the area," Sommer said. "While they have this little game of competition they may or may not play, they are trying to encourage other people to invest."