What would you do if you were sent a $20,000 cheque for what the reader believes is an outstanding piece of journalism? That’s what happened to Atul Gawande, for a piece on healthcare in the New Yorker last summer. It came from investor and philanthropist Charlie Munger, business partner of philanthropist Warren Buffett. HuffPo reports that Gawande donated it to a hospital.
“[Gawande] had an article last summer that was absolutely magnificent,” Buffett said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday morning. “My partner Charlie Munger sat down and wrote out a check for $20,000 to him and he’s never met him, never had any correspondence with it, he just mailed it to the New Yorker and he said, ‘This article is so useful socially. He says,’ Just give this as a gift to Dr. Gawande.’
A rep for the New Yorker tells the Huffington Post that Gawande did not accept the money personally. Instead, he accepted it as a donation to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health for an international health project they are working on in coordination with World Federation of Societies of Anesthesiology and the World Health Organization. The project aims to “distribute oxygen monitors in developing countries with inadequate surgical safety equipment.”
