Gates Of Heaven.(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Melinda Gates)

Byline: Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

The wife of a software billionaire plans to wipe out hunger and disease in our time, and she may just do it. Michael Specter meets the passionate, private Mrs. Gates.

Melinda French Gates may be the most ambitious woman on Earth; she certainly has some of the most profound ambitions. "We are trying to solve hunger in the world," she says matter-of-factly when asked what she considers the principal goals of the world's largest philanthropy, which she runs with her husband. "And, of course, disease." Of course. It's a simple idea, really, but also revolutionary. "We started this foundation with the premise that all lives are created equal. If an American child should be protected from measles"not to mention polio, rotavirus, malaria, or any number of maladies that are common in the developing world yet forgotten in the United States"then so should a child living in Zambia."

That's good news for the world, in part at least because Gates usually gets what she wants. She was raised in Dallas, the daughter of an engineer and a full-time mom who were both committed to community service. She was valedictorian at Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school whose motto, aptly enough, was Serviam ("I will serve"). She whipped through Duke, and then its business school, in five years, studying economics and computers (both of which helped her land a job in 1987 at that young Seattle computer company Microsoft).

Melinda French arrived at Microsoft at the age of 22 and quickly made her mark, helping to develop such products as Encarta and Expedia, then running a division that produced several hundred million dollars in sales each year. "I loved working at Microsoft," she tells me when I visit the foundation's Seattle headquarters. "Loved it." Yet, after marrying the bossyes, that boss, Bill Gatesin 1994 and giving birth to their first child two years later, she decided to leave the company. "Bill was shocked. He said, 'But you love your job so much, how can you do that?,' and I said, 'Come on, Bill. I can't work and have you with a full-time career and think this is a family.' Which he got."

So that ended her career at Microsoft; but four years later she and her husband started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, with assets currently hovering around $35 billion, is not only the world's largest (by a long shot) but its most effective as well. "Basically I am balancing two loves," she told me. "The love of the work I do, what we hope to accomplish with the foundation, and the love of my kids. So now," she concludes with a shrug and a smile, "I am a working mom."

At 44, Melinda Gates is fully aware that there are many types of working moms and that she is the type that happens to be married to one of the richest men in the world. If the wealth, power, or anything else fazes her, it's a remarkably well kept secret. Gates may be driven, but she is also utterly without pretense. When she says she wants to "solve" problems like hunger and disease, she knows she is asking the impossible of herself. She prefers it that way. "The great thing for us with the foundation is that we are here for the long haul," she says. "So I can give it as much time or as little as I choose right now. But I get so drawn in, and I want to be such a huge part of it. . . . Yet I always have it in the back of my head that my kids are not going to be this age forever. My youngest child will be gone in twelve years," she says. "My oldest will be gone in six years. That is the blink of an eye."