The key to fighting malaria might come from Westlake, where the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute has one of the world's largest malaria laboratories. The center for the worldwide testing of HIV vaccines is in Eastlake's 1600 building, above a bakery. But that's not all. Add the University of Washington, which just created a new department of Global Health; the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; the nonprofit PATH, in Ballard; and a constellation of other laboratories that are all working on research from Burkina Faso to Beijing.

Once you know what goes on inside these buildings, Seattle may never seem the same. When you are stopped at a light on Westlake Avenue, you might close your eyes, tune in to an imaginary wavelength and hear a high-pitched whine from a colony of mosquitoes, whose cousins bring malaria to millions. Not far away, on Eastlake Avenue, your antennae might sense the weary frustration of workers fighting the HIV epidemic that threatens to orphan children in much of southern Africa. And when you are stopped at one of Eastlake Avenue's lights, you may hear Ghanian drummers and the plucking of Indian sitar strings.

Last summer, a Harvard global health expert told a National Public Radio interviewer that we have entered a golden age in global health research, where problems once thought intractable are now considered solvable. The dramatic turnaround was stimulated in large measure by the philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which the Gateses founded in 2000 and now has assets of about $32 billion. That amount does not include the $31 billion Warren Buffett committed to the foundation last summer. Of course, by the time Buffett made his surprising announcement, the Gates Foundation was already one of the most powerful agents for change worldwide, and it had made global health a top priority from the beginning.

Yet many Seattle institutions have been working on global health issues since the 1970s, including a strong department of infectious diseases at the University of Washington and two nonprofits: PATH (originally called Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) and SBRI, the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. Moreover, many Seattle scientists had major careers studying infectious diseases before Bill Gates became famous.

All this rich history, combined with fuel from the Gates Foundation money, has meant that Seattle now joins a handful of cities where global health policy is made.

In the 1970s King Holmes began working at the University of Washington doing research on sexually transmitted diseases and viruses. In those days, sex and viruses were not linked to the AIDS epidemic. Holmes became an expert on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and he was recently named the chair of the new Department of Global Health, created last year as a joint effort of the UW's School of Public Health and School of Medicine. The new department has received seed money from the Gates Foundation.

Chris Elias came to Seattle just six years ago. He is now the president of PATH. Global health "has been around, underfunded and politi- cally ignored for years," says Elias. But the way the public sees it has changed, and, perhaps more important, the notion that problems are too big to solve has changed. Elias adds that approaches to global health are "joining a cutting-edge business model with science and applying it to sustainable solutions. The challenge is reframing it so it isn't charity."

Nobel Prize winner Leland Hartwell, president of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, sees a big change in how the public sees the world, which, eventually, might mean a change in how the world sees Seattle. "I don't know quite how to get my finger on the pulse," he says, "but ... there's a groundswell of interest and commitment to public health." Calling it a quiet revolution, Hartwell says that younger scientists in particular seem very committed to working toward worldwide goals in fighting disease.