In 1969, a group of American Indians from many different tribes, calling themselves Indians of All Tribes,
occupied the Alcatraz island in San Francisco. A call went out for doctors to help a pregnant woman there give birth and Brilliant joined their occupation as unofficial doctor. The Indians on Alcatraz named the baby "Wovoka" after a Northern Paiute medicine man. After the US government forced the Indians of All Tribes off Alcatraz, Brilliant became a media darling which led to a movie company casting him in
Medicine Ball Caravan, playing a doctor in a film about a tribe of hippies who follow the
Grateful Dead,
Jefferson Airplane,
Jethro Tull, and
Joni Mitchell. The cast was paid with airline tickets to
India. Brilliant and some others cashed their tickets in and rented a bus to drive around Europe, which then turned into a relief convoy to help victims of the
1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Civil unrest stopped the relief caravan so he spent several years in India studying at a
Himalayan ashram with
Neem Karoli Baba (a
Hindu sage) from whom he received the name Subramanyum. After about a year, Neem Karoli Baba advised Brilliant to eradicate smallpox, a project on which he would spend the next several years. He participated, as a medical officer, in the
World Health Organization (WHO) smallpox eradication program that in 1980 certified the global eradication of smallpox. Brilliant found that Indian officials became more receptive to his efforts when they learned of Neem Karoli Baba's involvement, to which he credits a significant portion of the program's success. Brilliant contributed a seven-page account of his experiences to the book
Miracle of Love: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba. He spent the first half of 2005 as a volunteer helping out in
the tsunami in
Sri Lanka and working in India with WHO in the campaign to eradicate
polio. On February 22, 2006,
Google Inc. appointed him as the Executive Director of
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, a position which he held until April, 2009, when he joined the Skoll Foundation, as its President, the philanthropic organization established by former eBay president Jeff Skoll. In July 2006, he was awarded the
TED Prize, granting him $100,000 and 'One Wish to Change the World' which he presented at TED in July 2006. As his prize nominator summed up, "'Dr. Brilliant' is a name to live up to, and he has." His one wish that he presented at the conference was, "To build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares." Following the
H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2010, Brilliant expressed concern that the public was not suitably concerned by the threat posed by
infectious diseases. This led to Brilliant and several colleagues contributing to the creation of the film
Contagion, released the following year in 2011. In May 2013, he gave the commencement speech at
Harvard School of Public Health, In 2016, Brilliant published a memoir, ″Sometimes Brilliant″.
COVID-19 In spring 2020, Brilliant commented that the
World Health Organization, where he had worked for ten years, was slow to declare
COVID-19 a pandemic. Brilliant participates as an advisor to the COVID-19 Technology Task Force, a technology industry coalition founded in March 2020 collaborating on solutions to respond to and recover from the
COVID-19 pandemic. ==Personal life==