To help us tell the next chapter of the smallpox eradication history, we went to someone

who's lived a lot of lives, a civil rights activist, a dead head, a disciple of Guru

named Karole Baba, a tech entrepreneur, and an epidemiologist.

Hi, I'm Larry Brilliant, and I had the great honor of working on the WHO Smallpox

eradication program.

Larry was looking for his place in the world as a young man.

It took him all over the United States and beyond.

Hoping that I would find something that was better than capitalism that helped the poorest

and most vulnerable communities.

That calling eventually led him to India and the campaign to end smallpox.

And those days, the world really wanted a victory in global health.

So we wanted as a world to eradicate smallpox.

At one point, when government reports suggested that smallpox was getting worse, not better,

a young Larry still believed his team could beat the disease.

Many said that version of him from 50 years ago was perhaps brilliant, but also impatient

and a bit brash.

So when one honcho at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva said he would eat a truck

tire.

If they ever managed to get rid of smallpox, Larry and his boss, a Swiss French epidemiologist

named Nicole Gresset, took the bet.

A few years later, after the WHO declared victory over smallpox in 1980, Nicole and Larry

mailed the skeptic a tire all the way from India with a little note saying,

...