Bill Gates’ career has been split down the middle with the first half dedicated to computer science through Microsoft and the latter half dedicated to medical science through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So can Bill Gates be accurately classified as a scientist?
Bill Gates is not a scientist. Despite being one of the greatest minds of our generation, Bill does not have an undergraduate degree in either computer science or medical science. Gates dropped out of Harvard University in 1975, while mid-way through a law degree, to focus on building Microsoft full-time.
But this isn’t to undermine Bill’s tremendous contribution towards both computer science and medical science. Let’s run through some of the great achievements Bill Gates has unlocked throughout his career.
The Microsoft Story
The Microsoft story began in December 1974 when Gates picked up a copy of Popular Electronics magazine, which featured an Altair 8800 computer on the front cover. Gates went on to discover that the computer didn’t come with an interpreter, so most customers bought one separately. From this, an idea was born.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership under the name ‘Micro-soft’. They set out on creating an interpreter for the Altair 8800 coded in BASIC. They went on to sign a deal with MITS, the creator of the Altair 8800, which ultimately encouraged Gates to drop out of Harvard.
Through the mid-80s, Microsoft continued to sell variants of BASIC and MS-DOS, a new operating system that Bill and Paul created for IBM Personal Computer. From here, Microsoft started to take off, and by 1985, they had released their own operating system ‘Windows’.
Bill continued to be one of the lead, if not the lead, developer(s) at Microsoft until 1989 when he stepped into a more managerial role.
Bill Gates the Computer Scientist?
So it’s fair to say that the launch of Microsoft, and particularly Windows 95, changed the world! Gates is a genius-level programmer, and the software that Microsoft introduced was years ahead of itself.
So why can’t Bill Gates be called a computer scientist?
Although he is a tremendous developer and has published two research articles in mathematics, Microsoft made these contributions as an organization. While Gates undoubtedly had considerable involvement in innovations such as Internet Explorer and Windows 95, he was not personally responsible for them.
Despite this, Gates has delivered several computer science lectures at academic institutions across the globe. In 2004 he took to the stage at MIT and delivered a speech titled ‘Software Breakthroughs: Solving the Toughest Problems in Computer Science’.
Gates has also received honorary doctorates in Computer Science from Nyenrode Business Universiteit (2003), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2002), Waseda University (2005), Tsinghua University (2007), the Karolinska Institute (2007), and Cambridge University (2009).
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
After stepping down as the CEO of Microsoft in 2000, Bill Gates announced his intention to focus on philanthropy full time. The Foundation is primarily focused on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.
Having donated more than $36 billion to the Foundation, over the last 25 years, they’ve helped to improve health in lower-income countries, eradicate polio, cut child mortality in half and significantly reduce deaths from HIV, TB, and Malaria.
Bill Gates the Medical Scientist?
Although Bill is incredibly well-versed in the field of epidemiology, he is not a scientific researcher. Through the Foundation, Bill has a vast team of researchers, including a handful of PhD students, that he pays to research global health challenges.
He listens to them and educates himself on their advice before delivering the information to the public. As a multi-billionaire and successful businessman, Bill’s word has more impact and grounding than the researchers would have.
So it makes sense that Bill has been outspoken about vaccinations, medicine, and epidemiology over the years. He even delivered a TED Talk about Global health pandemics in 2014.