Bill Gates honoured with doctor's cap

On Wednesday evening, Bill Gates received his doctor's cap, ring and diploma as he and his wife Melinda French Gates were honoured at a special conferment ceremony at Karolinska University.

Bill and Melinda Gates were made honorary doctors of medicine in April 2007 for their contributions to global health, especially healthcare in developing countries.

Together they finance, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, research into a number of areas, including vaccines for HIV/AIDS and malaria. Melinda Gates was honoured in her absence as she was in Mali at the time for an AIDS project being run by the foundation.

Scientists in global health

After the ceremony, a reception was held at which KI scientists in global health presented their fields of interest to Bill Gates. Many of the different projects have been made possible thanks to grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"It's wonderful to be here and to hear about all the research that's going on," said Mr Gates. "Some of it we're already supporting and some is very interesting to our objectives."

To date, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000 and which now has assets of over 30 billion dollars, has given 7.8 billion dollars in funding to research and to healthcare and education projects in developing countries.

As a gift from Karolinska Institutet, Mr Gates received a sample of the original Kiseljord (silica) in which the Swedish scientist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founding professors of Karolinska Institutet (1810), discovered the element silicon.

Text: Madeleine Svärd