Brain: Dan Grigsby

My answers are the same: Bill Gates, in his role as chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fixing disease in the Third World is often less about cutting-edge technology than it is about simpler things like hygiene and logistics. The genius of what Gates has done comes not from the oft-discussed “balance sheet” approach to deciding where investment will have the largest impact. Instead, it’s from what Anil Dash describes as “imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one-third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.” Saul Griffith is solving the energy production equation at both the micro and macro level . . . . He founded Potenco, whose pull-cord power generators provide a power source for safe electric lighting. Saul’s latest venture, Makani Power, is pioneering tethered, high-altitude wind power generation and is supported by the Google Foundation . . . . Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus for MIT’s Media Lab and [founder of] the One Laptop Per Child education project . . . at the heart of a mission to raise the bar in education in the Third World.

In a heartbeat, but only if everyone else could too. Giving yourself a fifty-point boost is selfish; raising the planet’s collective intelligence is good for the species.

Street smart is synonymous with problem-solving, which is at the heart of anything interesting.