Bill Gates had a good idea yesterday, but failed to take it to its logical conclusion.

To make a point about malaria the billionaire software mogul punctuated a talk by releasing mosquitoes into the concerned audience.

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some,” Gates told the invitation-only Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in California (Fox News, AFP). “Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

As the New York Daily News and other papers noticed, at a conference like TED this was always going to end up on twitter.

“Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said: “Not only poor people should experience this.” :)” wrote Facebook manager Dave Morin. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar added, “That’s it, I’m not sitting up front anymore.”.

Later the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which has combating malaria as one of its aims – said the insects were not carrying the disease. Now if Bill Gates really wanted to solve the malaria problem, what he should have done is get all the world’s important people in a room and actually infect them with malaria. I think we’d see interest in malaria research rise pretty sharply after that.

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