Don’t miss Larry Brilliant’s May 14th “The Next Wave of Corporate Philanthropy” at Stanford’s ETL series. As you no doubt know, Larry is the Executive Director of Google.org. At the lecture link you’ll find six video highlights, including a 12 minute segment on Google.org’s Five Core Initiatives [video page]. You can fetch the audio podcast here.
I’ll write up a bit of Larry’s talk when I have time — unless somebody else does the work for me. Meanwhile, here are four previous posts on Larry, Google.org and InSTEDD.
In the segment where Larry was discussing the early detection goals of the InSTEDD project, he offered an anecdote on the evil potential of too many animals and humans living cheek-to-cheek — as is common in Asian countries. Example humans/pigs/chickens - feed chicken parts to pigs - feed pig parts to chickens - humans eat both, human dung. Perfect laboratory for virus to jump species while acquiring deadly new traits. Microbes too of course.
The ancedote on SARS: Dr. Brilliant stated without qualification that the SARS coronavirus reservoir is bats, who passed SARS to civet cats, thence to humans. Brilliant said the bats and civets are kept together in crowded conditions in Guangdong’s wild animal markets [civets are a Chinese delicacy]. The vector from civets to humans isn’t clear to me. I did a bit of research — which I won’t detail here. Here is a summary of the relationship:
“Guangdong’s wild animal markets are a very important transmission ground for SARS,” Zhong said.
He also described civets as playing the role of an “amplification tool” in the SARS epidemic. Once they contracted it, they spread it among themselves like wildfire.
I recommend that you get directly over to the ETL site to download at least the MP3 podcast. This is a rare opportunity to learn more about Google’s unique approach to philanthropy, their priorities and a bit on how they are doing.
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