Do a Google search for Dr. Larry Brilliant and you’ll get links to the worlds of medicine, technology, music and religion.
Prominent, too, is a link to Google Inc. itself, as Brilliant, 63, is now the executive director of Google.org, the Internet company’s philanthropic arm.
Brilliant, a Grateful Dead fan who helped rid the world of smallpox, watches over an enterprise at Google.org that’s valued at $2 billion. That makes it, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the largest in-house corporate foundation in the world. (Other groups, like the Gates Foundation, are not parts of their founders’ companies.)
Last week, Google.org announced more than $25 million in grants and investments. It hopes to spend $175 million in the next three years.
In doing this, the Google company is making progress on fulfilling a pledge it made in going public in 2004 that it would give away 1 percent of its equity and 1 percent of its profits.
Google.org is different from other philanthropic ventures that have grown out of corporate success in that it invests some of its money in for-profit companies.
“We’re trying to bring the concept of Silicon Valley with angel investors, private equity and bankers,” Brilliant told The New York Times.
In keeping with that concept, Google invested $10 milllion in eSolar.inc, a company that designs solar thermal power plants.
At the same time, Google.org, which has a nonprofit arm, the Google Foundation, is making grants to not-for-profits.
Among the grants announced last week was $4.7 million to TechnoServe, a nonprofit that helps small and midsize business in developing countries.
Brilliant would seem to be the perfect person to oversee the dual mission of Google.org.
He’s been the CEO of technology-based companies. At the same time, he’s a medical doctor who’s had extensive experience battling disease in developing countries.
He was a medical officer with the World Health Organization’s successful effort to eradicate smallpox in India and other countries. He was also part of a WHO program to combat blindness in India.
Brilliant also brings a personal awareness of illness. He was 26 and finishing his surgical internship in San Franciso when he was diagnosed with cancer.
He took some time off to heal and during that time found himself as the physician for a group of American Indians that had occupied Alcatraz.
After that, he was cast in a part in the 1971 movie Medicine Ball Caravan, a kind of sequel to Woodstock Nation. Wavy Gravy, head of the Please Force, the “security” force at the first Woodstock, was also in the film, as was the singer Alice Cooper.
It was, by all accounts, a dreadful movie, but after doing some of the filming in England, Brilliant traveled to India, where he spent time in an ashram in northern India.
He ended up remaining in India with the World Health Organization to battle smallpox. After that, Brilliant and his wife, Girija, went back to the United States where he studied public health at the University of Michigan, his undergraduate alma mater.
Later they started the Seva Foundation in San Francisco, a not-for-profit dedicated to the eradication of blindness in poor countries. Through the foundation, they became friends with Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead; Weir remains an advisor to the foundation.
Wavy Gravy, a member of Seva’s Board, was enthusiastic when Brilliant was named to head Google.org in February 2006.
“Larry takes his bedside manner where there is no bed, ” he told the Grateful Dead News. “We’re all in this big hospital, all of us people on the planet. The infusion of wealth, rightly directed, can cause great healing to occur. If he can activate more people to do that, he can create tremendous good.”
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