NEW
YORK - Singing rap, citing Buddhist
teachings, and once dreaming of being a sports star, the likely next head of
the World Bank may not be widely known ? but he's no faceless bureaucrat.
Korean-born
Jim Yong Kim is the president of Ivy League Dartmouth College, a medical doctor
and, above all, a renowned campaigner against AIDS and tuberculosis in some of
the world's poorest regions.
The
52-year-old's CV glitters with prestigious posts at Harvard Medical School and
Brigham and Women's Hospital, among others.
An
anthropologist, Kim is also one of the foremost actors in the kind of global
health problems that are often seen as nearly hopeless.
In the
mid-1990s he worked in Peru to develop the first large-scale treatment of
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in a poor country, a program now run in some
40 other nations.
Between
2003 and 2007 he also led a World Health Organization initiative to bring
antiretroviral drugs to three million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing
countries, while a nonprofit he co-founded, called Partners in Health, works
with impoverished communities everywhere from Haiti to Russia.
That
work has brought Kim fame in academia and global health institutions, but the
bespectacled professor tapped by President Barack Obama to head the World Bank
is virtually unknown to wider circles.
A
closer examination reveals a passionate character prone to a surprising mix of
the straight-laced and quirky.
From
the day his parents brought him from South Korea to Muscatine, Iowa, at the age
of five, Kim was the archetypal, breathtakingly high-achieving American
immigrant.
At
Muscatine High School he was all-American ? both class president and
quarterback on the football team.
"My
childhood dream job was that I would play quarterback either for the Minnesota
Vikings or the Chicago Bears," he said in an interview last week on the
Charlie Rose television show.
Kim's
dentist father taught at Iowa University and his mother had a Ph.D. in
philosophy, so not surprisingly the young sports fan quickly veered to more
cerebral pursuits, graduating first from prestigious Brown University, then
Harvard Medical School, and finally earning a Harvard Ph.D. in anthropology.
Married
to Lim Youn-sook, a pediatrician who has worked with HIV children in Africa,
Kim talks movingly about his work in combating infectious diseases.
"The
lowest points were back in the mid-1990s when we discovered all of these
patients who were suffering from drug-resistant tuberculosis ... sitting there
in a slum in Lima, Peru, watching them die," he recalled in the Charlie
Rose interview.
Dealing
with such misery, he said, was easier thanks to lessons learned from a Buddhist
monk.
"One
can be mindful and at peace and experience great happiness while at the same
time struggling against some of the most difficult problems one can
imagine," he said.
But
thanks to his job at Dartmouth, there's a racier aspect to this serious and
outwardly placid man's life.
Although
the college is something of an ivory tower, it's been embroiled since January
in allegations of revolting initiation ceremonies at a frat house, where new
members were supposedly made to swim in vomit and other bodily fluids.
Kim's
own partying might raise eyebrows among his more staid colleagues at the World
Bank.
Last
year at the university's "Idol" music contest, the college president
appeared in a studded white leather jacket, with fingerless gloves, spaceman
glasses and glowstick bracelets, to rap alongside students.
"I
came up in here to make it rock, light a fire, make it hot," he sings in a
widely circulated video of the performance, while doing a robot dance.
From
the cheering in the audience, it appears the probable future head of the World
Bank stole the show.
AFP
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