The panel on global health at the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau well and truly laid the gauntlet down to young researchers from around the world. On the panel was: Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Ada Yonath, Noble Laureate in Chemistry 2009 for her groundbreaking crystallography work revealing the structure and function of the ribosome; Sandra Chishimba , a malaria researcher from Zambia; and Jonathan Carlson, a researcher into HIV/AIDS at Microsoft Research.

Bill Gates said that we must pay more attention to the 'silent voices' in poor countries, who don't have their medical needs met by funding from their governments or companies. It sounds unbelievable, but he told us that 10 times more research funding goes into finding a cure for male baldness than finding a cure for malaria - which kills 850,000 people a year.