Larry Brilliant Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Your guru sent you out and said, "Go get rid of smallpox." India was a place, and the surrounding countries, where this could happen because the UN was on an effort to wipe it off the face of the earth and India was key in that. You set about doing that as part of an organization. Did you evolve in that process? The situation was horrendous. Talk a little about how you interacted with that environment.
It's even more interesting than that because when he told me to go work for the UN and work in the smallpox eradication program -- and in Hindi he said, "Smallpox will be eradicated, this is God's gift to humanity" -- there was no smallpox program yet. Every time I would go to the UN and say, "My guru who lives in the Himalayas has told me to come work for you, there's going to be a smallpox program," they would say, "Thank you very much for coming," and send me out the door. It was only after fifteen, sixteen, seventeen trips that I bumped into D.A. Henderson, who was, in fact, the head of the smallpox program from Geneva, coming to India on a trip to establish that program. How my guru could possibly have fathomed or been prescient enough to know that has eluded me all of my life. I don't know. I'd love to know the answer to that question.
As far as myself, I was the mascot on the team. I was twenty-six or twenty-seven when I started, and I was adopted by these giants of public health who took me under their wing: Bill Fagey, D.A. Henderson, Nicole Grasset. They were legends in my field, and I was the luckiest guy in the world because I was just a kid. I had never seen smallpox, I probably couldn't have spelled "epidemiology" then.
This was hard work, the role that you played. Last night I watched the video of your acceptance of the TED Award, and you showed horrific pictures of what happens to a child who has the disease. So this was about reaching a number of homes using the manpower of the UN and convincing people of the horror of the disease, and overcoming all sorts of cultural barriers. This was a political, cultural conundrum where the science was very clear -- the cure, the medicine was there -- but a horrendous task. Talk a little about that. Is there some way you can give our audience a brief feel for that?
Well, in retrospect, of course, I'm aware it was quite difficult. We had to make over a billion house calls, we had 150,000 people working in the program. Twenty-five children [were] killed by jeeps that ran over them, and we lost medical officers who died on boats, on planes. Everybody got sick, we always had dysentery, many of us got malaria and pneumonia, and I got entemybehestilitica, pymanelipusnana, and a whole lot of other funny-sounding names. So, in retrospect, it sounds terribly difficult, but it wasn't difficult when we led that life.
There's something about being able to work to eradicate the first disease in the world. I was just recently in India working on the polio eradication program, which may become the second disease eradicated. It's the same thing there. It calls forth something in you that's much greater than you are. While it may seem hard, and these lists of things that occur are indeed very difficult, it doesn't feel like that. You feel blessed, privileged, honored to work in the program.
I don't think any of us have ever been, or will ever be, as noble as we were then, or work as hard as we did, or been as smart or as dedicated. So, it sure didn't feel hard at the time. We were exhausted. We could fall asleep standing up in the middle of a conversation. We were sick all the time. But it felt so good to be doing something as important as that.
Somewhere in my reading for this interview there was a point about the difficulty of going into a home and convincing people that this was an illness. I guess if a child got smallpox the people in the house thought that this was a visit of a deity, and so therefore you shouldn't have a stranger come in to give the shot.
You've done your homework.
I raise that just to show the entrenched cultural forces -- in other words, objectively this was a difficult problem, even though you and your teams may not have been experiencing that because of your sense of service.
It was very difficult. The deity was Shethelema, the Cooling Mother. The Sanskrit word for cooling is shethe. Indeed, when the child had smallpox the feeling was that there was the presence of Shethelema in the house, and Shethelema was propitiated both to keep away smallpox and to be kind to the person who had smallpox. We actually were able to take that and make that part of the program by starting our surveillance efforts at Shethelema temples, figuring that people would have gone to propitiate Shethelema when they had smallpox.
Sure, very difficult. I did things that I would never imagine that I could ever do, or would want to do, again. I was part of the American Civil Liberties Union when I was back in Detroit, and here I was in India breaking into people's homes in the middle of the night and forcibly vaccinating them, because they were spreading smallpox to the entire world and there were some places that had become such broadcasters of smallpox that thousands of people were dying because that community would not allow themselves to be vaccinated, even when the law said they had to be vaccinated or they had to go to jail, or they had to be forcibly vaccinated. So, there were a lot of ways that you had to use the whole nature of yourself in service to this amazing historic moment.
These workers had to sometimes revisit these houses again and again, to make sure ...
Oh, we visited every house in India twenty times. Every house, every month, for twenty times. Somewhere between one and two billion house calls.
Now after this work, you taught at Michigan, then you established the Seva Foundation here in Berkeley. I gather that you were led to this because one of the consequences of smallpox was blindness, or could be in some cases. Here you're moving from the UN, and then the university, to establishing a nonprofit that would address this problem of blindness in this part of the world.
You told me earlier that when you started doing these remarkable interviews, you were too young to know you couldn't do it. I think that was my sense.
[laughs]
It was something like that. Nobody told me you couldn't start an NGO and try to eradicate blindness from the world. We had just done it for smallpox, so it seemed logical that we could do it for blindness. And we had seen so many people who were blind from smallpox. Smallpox probably caused nearly half of all the blindness in India in the thirties and forties, and even as late as 1970 smallpox still accounted for 7 percent to 10 percent of all the blindness in India. It's a particularly cruel double hit to have your face torn up by the lesions of smallpox and your eyes torn up by those scabs as well. You can't look at somebody blinded by smallpox and not have your heart go out to them. So, that's how we started, plus we had these two amazing people, Nicole Grasset and Dr. Venkataswamy, who were determined that we would conquer blindness.
Seva's now twenty-eight years old and our projects -- not us, our projects -- have given back sight to more than two million blind people, which is a big number, and we're very proud of that.
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