Bill Gates Lets Mosquitoes Loose At A TED Conference

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 5, 2009

“Not only poor people should experience this,” said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference in Long Beach, California. Gates said this as he was opening a jar full of mosquitoes during his speech.

Gates was doing to make a statement about how malaria is a major problem in countries such as Africa and South East Asia. Malaria is often times transmitted by mosquito bites.  Gates’ way of presenting this issue got the whole room tweeting.

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur wrote a Twitter message saying “Bill Gates released mosquitoes at #TED we’re all leaving the room and getting sick.”  eBay founder Pierre Omidyar tweeted “That’s it, I’m not sitting up front anymore.”  Twitter and Blogger founder Evan Williams tweeted “Bill Gates just let live mosquitos out on stage. (@sara would be pissed if she were here.)”

Fortunately for audience members, the mosquitoes had no viruses.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hopes to significantly reduce malaria-related deaths by 2015.