Foundation Set To Spend Assets

With a $32 billion endowment that tops even that of the world’s richest university, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is set to spend itself out of existence, possibly before the end of the 21st century.

The Gates Foundation will spend all of its resources within 50 years of the death of the last member of the board of trustees, consisting of Bill Gates, 51, Melinda French Gates, 42, and Warren E. Buffett, 76, the Foundation announced last week.

The foundation, whose endowment will be $63 billion—more than double Harvard’s—when Buffett’s pledge of $31 billion is realized, will direct the money toward promoting global health and development, according to its Web site.

To accommodate the new schedule, the foundation will ramp up its payout, aiming to spend $3.5 billion per year beginning in 2009 and continuing through the decade, as compared to $1.3 billion spent last year, according to its Web site. It has committed itself to grants totaling $11 billion in its seven years of existence thus far.

The Gates Foundation has already given millions to fund global health research in Harvard’s labs.

Harvard’s vice provost for research policy, John P. Huchra, said that the announcement “will have no particularly major or minor positive or negative impact on what Harvard does, since we’re essentially interested in all the kinds of work that they want to get done.”

David A. Edwards, a biomedical engineering professor in Harvard’s Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, received a $7.6 million grant from the foundation to further his work in developing vaccination that uses inhaled sprays rather than needles, a method that could make vaccination easier and safer in developing countries.

Edwards said yesterday that although medical technology may not advance as rapidly as information technology—where Bill Gates made billions through his work at Microsoft—the “power is absolutely there to, if not solve the problem, at least reduce the inequalities.”

“The Gates Foundation has become the most significant supporter of research on pretty much all aspects of global health,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health.

Murray, who is also the Saltonstall professor of population policy, received $18.8 million from the Gates Foundation last year to research new ways to measure health status in developing countries.

Edwards said that funding from charitable organizations has helped to promote research, including his own, in areas that may not have profit potential to attract commercial investment, but that offer large benefits for the world’s poorest.

Edwards and Murray both praised the foundation’s commitment to establishing a timetable. Edwards called the move as “brilliant and decisive.”

The foundation also said in its statement that a newly created trust would separate the management of its endowment from the administration of its programs.

A Gates Foundation spokesperson declined to comment for this article.