It started with nuts. The pale boy with freckles was an eagle scout on the streets of Seattle, selling kernels to raise money for his troop. He could have eaten the nuts, or trousered the cash, but young Bill Gates took his scouting seriously and is said to have handed over all the proceeds to the troop. Thus begins the tale of history's greatest philanthropist.
This week, several decades later, the founder of Microsoft travelled to a rural clinic in Mozambique to announce the donation of £100m ($168m) to fight malaria in Africa and to reaffirm a promise to give away his £28bn fortune before he dies.
Gates is no natural baby-hugger, and he looked awkward sitting cross-legged on a reed mat with mothers at the Manhica clinic, but when addressing doctors, scientists and politicians, the money talk was fluent: $28m for new prevention strategies; $40m for new drugs; $100m for a vaccine. The slightly nasal voice sounded casual, condensing figures into one word: ahundredmilliondollars.
Scouring the continent for projects to support, yesterday he was in Botswana meeting prostitutes to discuss sexually transmitted diseases and ways for the richest man in the world to save lives. Or, as one wag put it, to do to HIV/Aids and malaria what he did to Netscape.
A new era of philanthropy has dawned, according to BusinessWeek magazine, with billions of dollars spilling from the likes of Ted Turner, George Soros and Paul Allen, and way ahead, leading the charge, is the Seattle nut-seller.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he runs with his wife, overtook the London-based Wellcome Foundation several years ago as the world's biggest charitable foundation. It has already spent more than £1.9bn of its £14bn assets on health projects in developing countries.
Gates has inherited the mantle of Rockerfeller and Carnegie and easily surpassed their largesse, says Stacey Palmer, editor of Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper of the non-profit world. At 47, the software architect is younger than his predecessors, more hands-on, and rather than build libraries is confronting iniquities in global health, a huge humanitarian crisis.
Having started out in the basement of his father's house, the foundation has moved to a two-storey building in Seattle that has no markings to indicate its purpose. Processing grant applications which would dwarf some governments' budgets is a small staff of around 200, headed by Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive who works at the foundation full-time for no salary. "What they're trying to do is extraordinary: to completely return their family's resources to society," she says in a telephone interview from Seattle.
Despite relinquishing day-to-day control of his company, Gates is still chairman and tends to just have weekends free for the foundation. "We get emails from him on Sundays quite frequently," says Stonesifer.
Currently working through a pile of applications from India, she confesses to occasional angst over rejecting proposals but says that such decisions help to retain a sense of value, useful for a man with a 11-digit bank account.
"When you can see $2, $4, being spent at a time, see the charts on the clinic wall showing children's health, that's what keeps the wealth so exciting. It keeps the money very, very real," she says. Wanting every cent to count, Gates grumbled about a South American proposal which insisted that a village's pigs be vaccinated as well as the humans.
If a man who spends his spare time swotting up on parasites and viruses and carries round copies of The Morbidity & Mortality Weekly comes across as unusual, his wife paints a picture of an ordinary family doing its best to spend extraordinary wealth.
Curled up on a sofa on the eighth floor of Johannesburg's Park Hyatt Hotel, Melinda Gates, dressed in a white knit blouse and red trousers, brown hair pulled back over an open face with a hint of lipstick, seems resolutely normal. The only hint of plutocracy are small diamond ear-rings, an assistant who takes copious notes during the interview and a burly man with an earpiece patrolling the carpet.
She and Bill field a constant stream of emails and reports relating to the foundation, she says. "I separately read the grants in whatever free time we find; sometimes it's late at night, or for me sometimes while the kids are at school. And then on the weekends we come together and take four or five hours. We'll take a walk, or be in one of our offices, or we'll be somewhere in the house where we can get quiet time to go through them."
The couple are constantly asked why. Why give away their money? To soften an image battered by federal anti-trust suits, say some. To avail of tax breaks, say others. The truth, says Melinda, has more to do with family tradition.
The eagle scout who raised funds for his troop was reared by upper-middle-class parents who volunteered for civic committees and raised money for charities in Seattle. "That was instilled in Bill very young as a child. It wasn't something the parents talked about on their own in the living room without the kids, it was part of the dinner-table conversation."
That humanist impulse faltered after Gates dropped out of Harvard and started building a business empire, she says. "You have to understand Bill was heads-down focused on Microsoft for many, many years." But their marriage in January 1994, followed by his mother's death six months later, prompted a reevaluation.
"We were thinking a lot about how Bill and his dad would start working together now. Was there something they could do together that they were both passionate about, and philanthropy, giving something back, was something that his mom believed deeply in."
Encouraged by her own parents, the young Melinda was also predisposed to philanthropy, volunteering for community service at her local hospital, school and courthouse. "I went to a Catholic school and an academy in Dallas where the motto was 'servium', which means to serve. For me personally there is a little bit of religious focus in [philanthropy]."
One small downside to the couple's do-gooding crusade is the official functions. "It's uncomfortable when you go into a room and people are thanking you all the time for what you've done."
The debate about whether the Gates' philanthropy is tinged by self-interest will continue as long as they give money but ultimately, says Jacqueline Bataringaya, HIV/Aids director of the NGO ActionAid, it is irrelevant. "Their motives don't matter to mothers with sick children. I think the announcements this week will have a big impact. And they set an example to other rich people and governments."
Despite reading Andrew Carnegie's 1889 tract, The Gospel of Wealth, which warns that he who dies rich dies disgraced, Gates started cautiously, funding computers in libraries and schools around Seattle, then in Africa. But two moments appear to have prompted a change: visiting Soweto to see an impoverished community with little use for the computer plugged into a generator; and reading about millions dying from preventable diseases in the World Development Report 1993. Since then the foundation has given more than $1bn to Africa for the prevention and treatment of diseases.
Critics complain that Gates and other foundations are vestiges of monarchism, that decisions are taken behind closed doors with little or no explanation and no right of appeal, while NGOs welcomed the philanthropy but were divided over whether it would be well-spent.
Mohga Kamal-Smith, Oxfam's health policy adviser, was concerned that pet projects would be favoured over the likes of the World Health Organisation. "The Gates money is a good contribution but that's not the way forward to handle a big health crisis. It would have been better to avoid piecemeal funding and invest in a global research activity."
But Chris Conrad, a regional director with Care International, which receives substantial backing from Gates, praised the "nimble, flexible" support. "They think outside the box, they're not risk-averse. And they don't ask for hundreds of pages of documentation before giving approval."
On one point the NGOs agreed. Philanthropy could never solve the big problems on its own. Governments, those in developing countries as well as the west, were the ones with the power - and responsibility - to really make a difference.
That's something the Gates foundation recognises, says Stonesifer, which is why it paid for dozens of journalists and photographers to accompany Bill and Melinda to Mozambique. "We decided to use the spotlight to elicit political will." A day after the trip a European government asked to collaborate on malaria projects, she says.
Three people with a vested interest in the philanthropy are the three Gates children. It is, arguably, their money that Mom and Dad are giving away. Bill has said they will inherit only several million dollars. Might they not resent missing out on the trappings of stratospheric wealth? Melinda throws back her head and laughs. "They're one, four and seven so right now I mostly discuss their allowance with them. They'll certainly get something but we'll have these conversations when they get older. If we do a good job as parents, I don't think they'll feel any differently about this than we do."
Top US givers
Paul G Allen
The MIH's eclectic approach to philanthropy includes giving $250,000 to the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians to help bridge the "digital divide", and money for research into how virtual-reality technology might distract burn victims from their pain. He's perhaps best known for sinking millions into Seattle's Experience Music Project, a $240m rock 'n' roll museum Allen built in 2000.
George Soros
After years pouring billions into central and eastern Europe, George Soros has turned his attention to the US. The Hungarian-born financier who says he indulges his "messianic fantasies in giving away money", directs his foundation, the Open Society, towards the improvement of care for the dying, alternatives to punitive US drug policies, the improvement of schools and lowering teenage pregnancy rates.
Ted Turner
After pledging $1bn (in instalments) to the UN, Turner saw his fortune slashed by the AOL Time Warner fiasco. He has now turned his attention to the environment. As the largest private landowner in the US, he is trying to reintroduce buffalo to the central plains and create a viable market for their meat; a national chain of buffalo steak restaurants is under way.
Thomas S Monaghan
Monaghan, founder of the Domino's Pizza chain, pledged $220m to build a Catholic university near Naples, Florida.
David Geffen
The former music mogul and co-founder of DreamWorks movie studios pledged $200m to the School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Alfred B Ford
The great-grandson of Henry Ford gave $10m to the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium, a house of worship to be built in Mayapur, India, for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
Edward Helmore