There's Bill Gates, best known now for tackling social issues of global importance via his foundation. There's co-founder Paul Allen, who, while keeping a hand in the tech space, has claimed the cultural spotlight as boss of Seattle's Super Bowl-winning Seahawks and owner of impressive megayachts.
When it's suggested to Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's first chief technology officer who joined in 1986 and left in 2000, that he doesn't seem the sporting or yachting type, the first of many sonic-boom laughs echoes around his dinosaur skeleton-filled office.
"You should have interviewed me two weeks ago," says Myhrvold (pronounced MER-vold), whose boyish demeanor defies his age, 54. "I was on a yacht diving in Bonaire."
Maybe the man does have at least one indulgent bone? Fat chance: Myhrvold wasn't in the Caribbean to lounge about but rather to polish his considerable photography skills.
Perhaps it's best to get this out of the way now. If our country has a living Renaissance figure, Myhrvold would qualify for the Benjamin Franklin-esque title. The man, who by his own admission "is not very good at dabbling," has charged into a range of fields and wound up challenging or changing the status quo.
"From the time I was little, I was interested in multiple things, checking out library books on everything from cooking to math," he says, sitting between a life-size skull of an ancient shark-eel called Dunkleosteus and a small plastic model of a Gulfstream V jet ("I have the big one, too," he allows with a smile).
Other souvenirs scattered about include a World War II-era Japanese anti-aircraft training gun, a wall-size periodic table of elements filled with actual samples of almost all the elements and, inevitably, the showstopper: the enormous head of the actual Tyrannosaurus Rex model used during the filming of Jurassic Park.
"When I was a kid, my mom would say, 'You ! really need to focus if you're going to amount to anything.' And in hindsight, she was likely right; maybe I could have accomplished more than I have," says the married father of two sons who have inherited his scientific mind. "But that's just not been me."
Mama Myhrvold need not have worried. Her son hasn't been frittering away his life since departing Microsoft.
A longtime lover of dinosaurs, he recently published a scientific paper arguing that the creatures' growth rates were actually a tenth of what the prevailing research indicated.
A foodie since long before the term was chic, he is in the midst of self-publishing a series of photo-driven books called Modernist Cuisine, which deconstruct the science of cooking and sell out despite a price tag pushing $600.
Still profoundly disturbed by the events of Sept. 11, Myhrvold — a Los Angeles-reared, Princeton-trained physicist who did post-graduate work under the legendary Stephen Hawking at Cambridge — is actively meeting senior U.S. officials to discuss the looming perils of terrorists waging war with biological weapons.
This has nothing to do with his day job running Intellectual Ventures, a company that buys patents ("What venture capital did for start-ups, we want to do for inventions," he says). Or its side venture, Global Good, whose projects include using lasers to zap the wings off malarial mosquitoes, which is being partly funded by the foundation run by good friend and former boss Gates.
"Look, I don't play golf," Myhrvold says. "Some of these projects are truly for the good of the world, and others, I won't attempt to defend other than to say I love doing them. When people ask me, 'Why did you get interested in dinosaurs?,' I just say, 'Why did you lose interest in them?' Because we all loved them as kids. I guess for me, it's often just a huge case of arrested development."
That is the key to Myhrvold's youthful attitude, says Bran Ferren, a pioneering technologist and co-founder of Applied Mi! nds who m! et his friend a few decades back when he was CTO at Disney Imagineering.
"His childlike curiosity about things keeps him young," says Ferren, who shares a beard, a slightly high-pitched voice and a passion for exploring with his pal. "As for his varied interests, I'd like to think that's what normal ought to be. We may be in an age of hyper-specialization, but people innately are curious about many things."
Ferren adds that Myhrvold always dives into something "with a mission to make a contribution." As for relaxing, "for guys like him, it's not about finding a new beach to lie on. When we go on a photography trip, that in and of itself helps clear the mind."
Nathan Myhrvold has quite the appreciation for dinosaurs. Check out some of the art around his office. VPC
Myhrvold is what futurist Paul Saffo calls a relatively new breed of public citizen whose professional, and often tech-driven, good fortune allows them to contribute to society at a higher level.
"The best news for paleontology, astronomy, cooking and all those other fields was his leaving Microsoft," says Saffo. "I call him an entrepreneurial intellectual, someone with the drive, resources and brains to go deep on matters that need attention. With any luck, he'll inspire other wealthy individuals to put their money and brains to good use."
Myhrvold — who led the development of Windows software and has an estimated net worth of $650 million — is pleased that "the Silicon Valley system allows people with a technical bent to dream of being rich." But he offers a cautionary rejoinder.
"The dot-com boom created a such a gold rush that some people get focused on creating me-too companies, so instead of doing something hard, they say 'Let's get 17 guys and do the next WhatsApp and sell it to Facebook for a gajillion dollars,'" he says. "Without taking anything away from that, we don't want to be a nation that only tries to solve small problems. That takes energy away from problems that may be more profound."
Will all due respect to the dinosaurs and finding a better way to cook a steak, there's little doubt what ranks highest on Myhrvold's intellectual to-do list. Close to the top would be the mosquito-zapping project, which takes laser-printer technology and adapts it to the pressing needs of sub-Saharan Africa. But at the pinnacle would be bio-terror.
The horrors of 9/11 are apparent, he says, but as many people — 3,000 — die each month in traffic accidents. "Look down the road 10 or 20 years and then ask, what could kill a million Americans? That's bio-terrorism," he says. "Are we doing the right things for it? I have so far not found anyone in government who has said, 'Yes, we're doing the right things.' "
Myhrvold made contact via an Intellectual V! entures employee with White House connections, who forwarded his boss's 50-page paper on the topic. Myhrvold says he's been impressed with the serious approach taken by various officials, but notes that "coordinating and prioritizing those efforts is critical."
He's essentially suggesting that a position of bio-terror czar could help anchor the efforts: "The most embarrassing thing about 9/11 is various parts of the government had suspicions about those (terrorists), and they didn't do anything about it."
The eternal optimist lets slip a rare sigh.
"When I write cookbooks, it's all in my control, but with this, nothing is in my control," he says. "But I'm going to keep trying. I can't be any other way."
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ABOUT NATHAN MYHRVOLD, 54
What: CEO, Intellectual Ventures, a patent-purchasing company
Where: Bellevue, Wash.
Why is dinosaur research so important? "You can make an argument that dinosaurs could save humanity. We now know they went extinct due to a meteorite that hit Earth, which caused people to start looking up in the sky for them. If you find one and it's a week away, well too bad, we had our run. But if it's 50 years away, you'd suddenly have the most important international project in history."
Why are you working on a laser that can kill mosquitoes? "Most of the tech industry makes tools or toys for the rich world. It's great fun, and I made money in that world myself. But the rich world doesn't need its life transformed; the poorest people do."
What's the key to fostering innovation in America? "I'm not a sports guy, but we all know the best hitter in baseball has a .400 average. That really means he's a miss-er, not a hitter; he misses 60% of the time. In the innovation game, you're batting .100 if you're lucky. So, baseball arranged its rules, and we need to set the innovation game's rules so that missing 90% of the time is OK. You need to make it culturally OK to fail."
USA TODAY's Change Agents series highlights innovato! rs and en! trepreneurs looking to change business and culture with their vision. E-mail Marco della Cava at mdellacava@usatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter: @marcodellacava.
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