Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man

Carlos Slim Helu takes No. 1 spot on Forbes World's Billionaires list as a record 164 10-figure titans return to the ranking amid the global economic recovery.


For the third time in three years, the world has a new richest man.

Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil ( AMX - news - people ), Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World's Billionaires.

Slim's fortune has swelled to an estimated $53.5 billion, up $18.5 billion in 12 months. Shares of America Movil, of which Slim owns a $23 billion stake, were up 35% in a year.

That massive hoard of scratch puts him ahead of Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) cofounder Bill Gates, who had held the title of world's richest 14 of the past 15 years.


Gates, now worth $53 billion, is ranked second in the world. He is up $13 billion from a year ago as shares of Microsoft rose 50% in 12 months. Gates' holdings in his personal investment vehicle Cascade ( CAE - news - people ) also soared with the rest of the markets.

Buffett's fortune jumped $10 billion to $47 billion on rising shares of Berkshire Hathaway ( BRK - news - people ). He ranks third.

The Oracle of Omaha shrewdly invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs ( GS - news - people ) and $3 billion in General Electric ( GE - news - people ) amid the 2008 market collapse. He also recently acquired railroad giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe ( BNI - news - people ) for $26 billion.

In his annual shareholder letter Buffett wrote, "We've put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble."

Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.

Notable People Who Dropped Out of School

Everyone knows how important it is to stay in school, get a good education, and graduate with a diploma. But it may be hard to stay focused after reading about the success of these famous dropouts. Hard work, drive, natural talent, and sheer luck helped them overcome their lack of education, but many still returned to school later in life.

In this article, you will learn about notable people including inventors, politicians, and entertainers who dropped out of school before their rise to fame.

1. Thomas Edison Thomas Edison is probably the most famous and productive inventor of all time, with more than 1,000 patents in his name, including the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. He became a self-made multimillionaire and won a Congressional Gold Medal. Edison got a late start in his schooling following an illness, and, as a result, his mind often wandered, prompting one of his teachers to call him "addled." He dropped out after only three months of formal education. Luckily, his mother had been a schoolteacher in Canada and home-schooled young Edison.

2. Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin wore many hats: politician, diplomat, author, printer, publisher, scientist, inventor, founding father, and coauthor and cosigner of the Declaration of Independence. One thing he was not was a high school graduate. Franklin was the fifteenth child and youngest son in a family of 20. He spent two years at the Boston Latin School before dropping out at age ten and going to work for his father, and then his brother, as a printer.

3. Bill Gates


Bill Gates is a co-founder of the software giant Microsoft and has been ranked the richest person in the world for a number of years. Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year after reading an article about the Altair microcomputer in Popular Electronics magazine. He and his friend Paul Allen formed Micro Soft (later changed to Microsoft) to write software for the Altair.

4. Albert Einstein


Although he was named Time magazine's "Man of the Century," Albert Einstein was not an "Einstein" in school. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist, famous for his theory of relativity and contributions to quantum theory and statistical mechanics, dropped out of high school at age 15. Deciding to continue his education a year later, Einstein took the entrance exam to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, but failed. He returned to high school, got his diploma, and then passed the university's entrance exam on his second attempt.


5. John D. Rockefeller


Two months before his high school graduation, history's first recorded billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., dropped out to take business courses at Folsom Mercantile College. He founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870, made his billions before the company was broken up by the government for being a monopoly, and spent his last 40 years giving away his riches, primarily to causes related to health and education. Ironically, this high school dropout helped millions get a good education.

6. Walt Disney


In 1918, while still in high school, future Oscar-winning film producer and theme park pioneer Walt Disney began taking night courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago. Disney dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the army, but because he was too young to enlist, he joined the Red Cross with a forged birth certificate instead. Disney was sent to France where he drove an ambulance that was covered from top to bottom with cartoons that eventually became his film characters. After becoming the multimillionaire founder of the Walt Disney Company and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Disney received an honorary high school diploma at age 58.

7. Richard Branson


Britain's Sir Richard Branson is a self-made billionaire businessman. He founded Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Records, Virgin Mobile, and most recently, a space tourism company to provide suborbital trips into space for anyone who can afford them. Suffering from dyslexia, Branson was a poor student, so he quit school at age 16 and moved to London, where he began his first successful entrepreneurial activity, publishing Student magazine.

Nucleotide BLAST

Nucleotide BLAST refers to the use of a member of the BLAST suite of programs, such as “blastn” to search with a nucleotide “query” against a database of nucleotide “subject” sequences.


Available Nucleotide-Level Searches

There are two members of the BLAST suite of programs that are designed to make nucleotide-to-nucleotide alignments. The first is the original BLAST nucleotide search program known as “blastn.” The “blastn” program is a general purpose nucleotide search and alignment program that is sensitive and can be used to align tRNA or rRNA sequences as well as mRNA or genomic DNA sequences containing a mix of coding and noncoding regions. A more recently developed nucleotide-level BLAST program called MegaBLAST (7) is about 10 times faster than “blastn” but is designed to align sequences that are nearly identical, differing by only a few percent from one another. MegaBLAST allows the rapid mapping of a transcript onto a typical 3 billion base mammalian genome in seconds, and is useful for processing large batches of sequences. A refinement of MegaBLAST, known as discontiguous MegaBLAST, uses a discontiguous template to define an initial “word” in which characters in some positions, such as those in the wobble base position of codons, need not match. Discontiguous MegaBLAST allows rapid cross-species mappings involving coding regions in cases where species differences in codon usage would prevent alignments using the original MegaBLAST program.



Examples of Nucleotide BLAST Searches

Problem 1

Click on the link indicated by “P” next to the “Nucleotide-nucleotide BLAST (blastn)” to access the problem. This problem demonstrates how to use BLAST to find human sequences in GenBank that can be amplified with a particular primer pair. Access the nucleotide–nucleotide BLAST page (by clicking on the Nucleotide–nucleotide BLAST link). Paste both the forward and reverse primers into the BLAST input box. Insert a string of about 30 N’s after the first primer sequence to separate the two sequences to be found in separate, not overlapping alignments. Limit your search to human sequences by selecting “Homo sapiens” from the “All organisms” pull down menu under the Options for advanced blasting and click the BLAST! link. Retrieve results by clicking on the “Format” button. Look for two hits to the same database sequence.

In this result, shown in Fig. 1, there are 13 GenBank entries that align to both the forward and reverse primers at different locations (indicated by thick bars) with a gap in between (indicated by a thin gray bar). There are two GenBank entries that align only to the reverse primer. One alignment of the primer pair to the GenBank entry L78833.1 is shown in Fig. 2. The forward primer aligns to the sequence L78833.1 on the forward strand (as indicated by Strand Plus/Plus) at nucleotides 3252..3270. The reverse primer aligns to the reverse strand (as indicated by Strand Plus/Minus) at nucleotides 3475..3457. Thus, the two primers will amplify the sequence from nucleotides 3252..3475 of the entry L78833.1. Retrieve the entry L78833.1 in Entrez, by clicking on it. The annotation shows that the amplified region covers the Exon 1a and the upstream sequence of the BRCA1 gene. Refer to the Note 1 for the multiple hits. You may perform similar search against the human genome BLAST database.

DNA Looping and Gene Expression

DNA looping is exactly that - the DNA molecule actually forms loops. These loops are created by proteins and protein complexes binding to different regions of the DNA structure. The proteins interact with each other and this causes loops to form. DNA looping is involved in many cellular processes such as transcription, recombination, gene expression, and replication. The neat thing about DNA looping is that when loops form in the DNA structure proteins that are bound some distance away from the genes they control can be brought to the promoter region by looping the intervening DNA.


Types of DNA Looping

There are two different types of DNA looping. The classification comes from the physical forces that control their formation:

1) Short or energetic - for DNA ~150 bp elasticity is the dominant force, and the bending and twisting of DNA is important, as is the elastic properties of the molecules that tie the loop.

2) Long or entropic - what is key is the motion of the DNA regions in the cell before they find each other.


DNA Looping Uses:

DNA looping plays many important roles in the life of a cell. By bringing two DNA regions together DNA loops enable the transfer of genetic information during recombination; they also tie the ends of chromosomes, and regulate the length of telomeres.

It is therefore a safe bet to assume that many malfunctions that occur in our bodies will be down to faults in the DNA looping process. So the more that is known about how DNA loops make sure gene expression goes off without a hitch, and the right gene is turned on - the better our chances of being able to fix things when they go wrong.

Understanding DNA looping is a burgeoning research endeavour, especially as some diseases, including cancers are caused or made worse by incorrect looping and errors in gene expression

Technology Education

Future technology education programs will be mind-blowing compared to what we have today. Technology education in the future will rely heavily on input learning and virtual reality experiential reenactment.

One of the benefits of future technology education is that people will finally be cloned. Of course moral objections will still remain in some countries like the U. S. but other countries will clone human beings for various reasons, like high IQ, pedigree, athletics and other reasons.


It will be clear in the future that cloned human beings do have a soul and the "soul splitting" or "soul fragmentation" theory will take root. This theory will basically say there are a limited number of souls and too many bodies, so when people die and more are reborn, souls split among many different human beings. This is why finding one's "soul mate" or "soul mates" will be increasingly important to people.

Future technology education will rely on wireless input into one's brain. Downloads of a plethora of textual information will be quickly transported via computer into the heads of students. Distance learning will be common. As well photographic memories for humans will be developed by future medical science.

But this "book learning" of the technology education will be no substitute for experiential learning. This is why virtual reality will play such an important role in the future of technology education.

For years, pilots have known the value of a flight simulator in order to practice take-offs, landings and other flying maneuvers. Video games for young people will lead to jobs in flying drones and doing other distance mechanical, robotic and aeronautical jobs.

But, this will be taken a step further in technology education. Students with the fear of public speaking will be able to practice delivering oral papers and calming themselves in front of a virtual setting.

Teachers will practice in front of virtual classrooms. Those doing technical repairs will also practice in a real life virtual simulation. First responders will be put inside virtual practice fields as will soldiers like stepping inside a video game. No longer will Tron or Total Recall be precursor movies that glimpse the future, but relics of the past.

The combination of this downloaded wireless textual information into one's brain and the virtual reality experiential training will be powerful technology educational devices that may be updated often to keep students and employees engaged in the latest happenings in their fields. No more conference calls and Powerpoint presentations.

Paradigm shifts and disruptive technology will be the norm in the future. Neural networks of computers will mean that both humans and non-humans will be learning at a rapid pace never seen before in the history of mankind.

In the virtual worlds I had previously talked of there will be mentors, guides and teachers combining to help students achieve high academic standards in their technology education program. Some of these will be programmed in while others will be human walk-ons into the virtual scenarios.

In technology education a few years from now, learning disabilities will be a thing of the past, partly due to advances in medical science that will prevent many cases through genetic alterations and for those few who are left, virtual and downloadable textual programs specific to each child's development, plus mentors, aids and teachers will not only strengthen the deficits but also develop the technological educational assets the child may already be endowed with.

Technology education many years from now won't be limited by geographical location. Students may learn the latest German, Japanese or Brazilian technical theories with either translations or by quickly learning a new language via the methods already described.

In the future, social media will have taken over and not just for talking to friends but for chatting with other students and colleagues. Most of these chats will take place by stepping into and out of virtual chat rooms. Wireless "brain alerts" will be given so that students know what chats are taking place at all times and choose to join or not to join at will.

Sleep, while still important will be condensed, focused and an intense experience so that both mind and body can consolidate images, thoughts, feelings (and relaxation) of the day and of the past. Future technology education will help psychiatrists and psychotherapists deal with patients who have experienced trauma, past, present or future.

Psychiatrists will already have the full DNA and genome structure of each patient before he or she walks into his virtual office. Prescribing pharmaceuticals will that will be highly targeted will be the norm. As for psychologists, future technology education will allow them to access and assess areas of trauma, resistance and denial quickly and use one of many psychological templates in dealing with emotional issues. The pain of grief, while not eliminated, will be a far shortened process.

This is just a glimpse into the new education technology of the future. Many other advances will be made that will shift the way we think and learn. The world as we know it will be more fluid, more science and technology based, less political and more about helping mankind solve problems of co-existence.

India among top 5 government funders of neglected diseases

India along with Brazil are now in the top 5 government funders of neglected disease R&D and are taking the lead on diseases like leprosy and dengue fever. An annual survey of investment into neglected disease R&D released, shows that nearly $2.96 billion was spent on making new products for neglected diseases in 2008. A key finding of the G-FINDER survey was that, for some diseases, traditional donor funding is being replaced by investment from pharmaceutical companies and Innovative Developing Countries (IDCs) such as Brazil, India and South Africa. Where there is no profitable market, as with many of the diseases that affect sub Saharan Africa, R&D remains heavily reliant on traditional donor and philanthropic funding


“These are tough economic times but, for the first time, we are seeing that for some neglected diseases the traditional reliance on charitable funding and donor aid is being replaced by a market and domestically driven R&D,” said report author, Dr Mary Moran of The George Institute for International Health. “This is good news for new medicines and diagnostics in India, Brazil and South Africa, but not for most of sub Saharan Africa where there is still no market and they will have to rely on donors and philanthropists for some time yet,” she added.

This trend reflects the growing research strength and pharmaceutical markets of India and Brazil, in particular, as well as high local incidence of diseases such as leprosy and dengue. The downside of this trend is that diseases of Africa continue to rely on donors, who still provide more than 85 percent of funds for Buruli ulcer, trachoma, kinetoplastid diseases like sleeping sickness and many helminth infections.


Report Findings


The G-FINDER report shows that in 2008 Innovative Developing Countries (IDC`s) like India, Brazil and South Africa and pharmaceutical companies funded:

1.Nearly 60 percent of R&D for pneumonia and meningitis


2.More than half (51 percent) of leprosy R&D (Brazil and India have the largest number of new leprosy cases per year in the world)


3.Nearly half (46 percent) of R&D for new dengue products (the Americas, particularly Brazil, along with Asia, have the highest global prevalence of dengue)


4.Around 20 percent of funding for new treatments and vaccines for diarrhoeal illnesses, TB and malaria (which occur worldwide)

“The G-Finder survey report has put India as the 5th largest public funder of neglected diseases, and ICMR provides 60 percent of the funds. Visceral leishmaniasis and leprosy are amongst most neglected diseases, and we must further improve our funding for research to find new tools to combat them,” said Dr V M Katoch, Secretary, Department of Health Research, and Director-General, Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi.


Other Key Findings


•Global funding for neglected disease R&D ground to a standstill in 2008, with funding cuts or freezes across the board including a $26.3 million decrease in funding from High-Income Countries (HICs)

•This injection of additional funds led to a net increase of $100.1m (3.9 percent) in global neglected disease R&D investment in 2008.

•Two organizations provided nearly 60 percent of global funding in this area in 2008: the US National Institutes of Health ($1.1 billion, 36.5 percent) and the Gates Foundation ($617 million, 20.9 percent).

•The pharmaceutical industry was collectively the third largest global investor, with companies providing one-eighth ($365 million, 12.4 percent) of global funding for neglected disease R&D.

"This G-Finder report confirms the welcome news that an increasing number of Pharma companies are allocating R+D resources to the neglected diseases surveyed. Although no major financial returns can be expected with medicines for many of these diseases in the foreseeable future, there is a growing sense of responsibility for underprivileged patients and reputational aspects,which are helping to improve the lives of patients”, said Prof Paul L Herrling, Head of Corporate Research for Novartis International.

Budget 2010 to boost research

Bangalore, Mar 03, 2010: Over the years, the finance ministry has given the life sciences industry due emphasis in budget. With India figuring low on various healthcare counts, increased allocation in healthcare shows the government’s commitment to tackle the situation.

Through the budget 2010, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has proposed to extend the scope of weighted deduction on expenditure incurred on in-house Research and Development to 200 percent from 150 percent, to be effective upto 2012. Mukherjee has also proposed to increase the weighted deduction on payments made to national laboratories and research organizations for scientific research from 125 percent to 175 percent. But at the same time increase in MAT to 18 percent from 15 percent and input duty on raw materials from 8 to 10 percent has made the industry unhappy.


Reacting to the budget Sanjay Nagrath, Chief Financial Officer, Intas Biopharmaceuticals says, “It is a welcome move from Finance Minister to raise weighted deduction on in–house R&D expenditure from 150 percent to 200 percent and weighted deduction on payment made to national laboratories research association, colleges, and other institutions for scientific research is increased to 175 percent from 125 percent. Reduction in excise duty on goods covered under the Medicinal and Toilet preparation Act from 16 percent to 10 percent is also a positive move.”


"GST (Goods & Services Tax) implementation from April 2011 was expected however it is important that the government ensures timely implementation”, he said.


Commenting on the weighted R&D deduction, Satish Reddy, Managing Director and COO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories said, “From the pharmaceutical sector perspective, which is an innovation driven industry, increase in weighted deduction on expenditure incurred on in-house R&D is a positive and encouraging move.


“The Government’s commitment to ensure continued growth of Special Economic Zones augurs well for industrial development. While we await the fine print on specifics and implementation proposal, the aim to implement GST and DTC by April 2011 is a welcome move, he adds.


Praveen Gupta, VP-Business Development, Premas Biotech echoed the same point,“The increase in allocation of fundings for biotech R&D has been a great step which will boost the research into some major areas. But he lamented at the fact that nothing has been done on the import duty which according to him is a major bottleneck in the competition at global scale.


In addition, the industry is almost unanimous in claiming that the benefits, which would accrue from this incentive, would be more than neutralized by the increase in MAT to 18 percent from 15 percent . The industry had requested that the last year's MAT hike from 10 percent to 15 percent be reversed in this budget, however the industry feels disappointed as this was not done.


“The increase in the MAT rate is a negative step for industry as it will increase tax burden on the MAT paying companies,” says Sanjay of Intas Biopharmaceuticals.


Satish opines, “Reduction in corporate surcharge will provide marginal relief while the MAT rate increase, which is likely to balance out the benefits, could have been avoided.”


The 2010 budget may prove to be a mixed bag for life sciences sector as well as patients, with prices of medicines going up marginally by 1-2 percent, while concessions given to medical, surgical, dental equipment and ortho-paedic implants leading to reduction in prices.


Industry feels that prices may be increased on account of higher raw material costs due to the two percent excise duty rollback. But concessions given to medical equipment, and exemptions of custom duty on inputs for manufacture of orthopedic implants should lead to a reduction in prices of these devices. Also, if certain parts are imported for manufacture of equipment in India, no CVD and SAD will be levied and only five percent basic customs duty will apply.


Gautam Khanna, Executive Director - Healthcare Business, 3M India comments, “A concession of basic duty on the manufacture of parts and accessories of medical equipments is a welcome move. Also, full exemption on medical equipments will help manufacturers make it available for end users at a better price.”


He further comments, “Increase in healthcare budget allocation is going to be a welcome change as it will help boost public health, insurance and infrastructure. This will hopefully see a potential increase in the penetration of health insurance in India and the move is expected to have a direct positive impact on the demand and quality of healthcare services in India.”


V Raja, President and CEO, GE Healthcare South Asia says, “While the budget is a very balanced one, we would have been happier if infrastructure status was granted to the healthcare industry. Healthcare industry is one of the largest and most critical one for healthy people, healthy country and a healthy economy. Infrastructure status would have helped healthcare industry to have access to more funds, more benefits and thus resulted in increased and affordable healthcare to the masses. “


Overall the industry was not really enthused with this years' budget and termed the steps announced not enough to give the necessary boost to the sector. The industry was also expecting an increase in healthcare infrastructure, with creation of focused SEZs and tax holiday on exports, which remained unaddressed.