A great friend to the teams at POLIS and the Centre for Global Studies has passed. Dr. Gordon Moore died on March 24th, 2023 at the age of 94. His philanthropy has been a foundational pillar of support to the POLIS Water Sustainability Project for over a decade, including POLIS’ most recent work on watershed security and wildfire resilience. In 2023 the POLIS Water Sustainability Project is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and it’s safe to say that the project wouldn’t have made it this far without the early and ongoing support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Gordon was not only one of the world’s leading philanthropists, he was also a renowned scientist and business leader who led two technology enterprises—Fairchild Semi-conductor and Intel—that arguably changed the world. Gordon and his lifelong spouse, Betty, established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to help make a similar positive impact by carefully donating their wealth to those working to make the world a better place. They directed the Foundation’s trustees and staff to “seek durable change, not simply delaying consequences for a short time” with the understanding “that science and the type of rigorous inquiry that guides science are keys to achieving the outcomes.”
Gordon grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal community near San Francisco and the area that would come to be known as Silicon Valley. Foundation staff recount how he had a lifelong “passion for the natural world, science, and experimentation, and he pursued that with a bright inquisitiveness, appreciation, and sense of gratitude that would last a lifetime and become guideposts for his philanthropy. Always an acute observer, this helped instill in Gordon a concern and abiding interest in conserving nature for future generations.”
In the late fifties, Gordon and the research team at Fairchild helped create and manufacture silicon transistors and then produced the world’s first microchip. He later predicted that the cost of transistors would decrease at an exponential rate as the number on each silicon chip doubled annually. The prediction known as Moore’s Law became the cornerstone of the semiconductor industry, and of the constantly evolving technologies that depend on it.
Gordon went on to help found Intel becoming its president and chief executive officer in 1975. Under his leadership, Intel became the world’s highest valued semiconductor chip maker and helped establish Silicon Valley’s culture and ethos of innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. For his pioneering contributions, Gordon was recognized with myriad honours. Among them are the National Medal of Technology in 1990 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, which is the highest civilian honour in the United States.
The financial success of Intel made the Moores even more focused on giving back to society to try to make the world a better place for their children and their children’s children. This began with individual gifts—many of them anonymous—and eventually, in 2000, led to the creation of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation “to create positive outcomes for future generations.” Gordon and Betty’s generosity over the past two decades has contributed more that $200 million toward increasing knowledge and protection of biodiversity in British Columbia’s wild salmon watersheds and marine environment.
Contributed by Ivan Thompson, drawing content with permission from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Ivan is a Community Practitioner Fellow at the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies. He worked for more that a decade as a program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
