High-Tech Hopes for Global Health

It takes chutzpah to entitle your book The Grandest Challenge: Taking Live-Saving Science from Lab to Village, but the authors of this brash volume, Abdallah Daar and Peter Singer, have a valid claim to it. Both are senior advisors to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—the world’s richest charity—in a program just as immodestly called the “Grand Challenges in Global Health,” which aims to innovate and introduce splendid new technologies to make the world’s poorest healthier ((Not to be confused with the Gates Foundation’s other programs that deliver the current interventions of global health, such as the usual battery of childhood vaccines, a vast philanthropy that has saved many lives.)). Both are professors at the University of Toronto and have illustrious medical careers behind them. Both have risen into second careers as high priests of global development, where they are much acclaimed, including by the Harper government, which has...