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Investing guru Warren Buffett -- above right, with Bill and Melinda Gates -- announced last week that he will gradually transfer more than $30 billion of stock in his Berkshire Hathaway firm to the Gates Foundation, which works to improve global health and U.S. education. Each installment must be spent in the year it's given; the $1.5 billion pledge for 2006 will double the foundation's current spending--and boost its already powerful impact.

The donations and pledges made by Warren Buffett--and Bill and Melinda Gates, who have given nearly $26 billion to their foundation so far--eclipse those of other great U.S. philanthropists

Andrew Carnegie $7.2 billion

John D. Rockefeller $7.1 billion

John Rockefeller Jr. $5.5 billion

Amounts adjusted for inflation

If the Gates Foundation were a country, its global-health spending in 2005 would place it just behind Finland in foreign-aid giving

The foundation fights more than AIDS and malaria. Some of its recent grants are being used to battle these lesser-known diseases

GUINEA WORM DISEASE $25 million to combat illness caused by a parasitic worm, which lives in fleas that infest standing water, mainly in Africa

DIPHTHERIA and other common diseases: $1.5 billion for vaccinations to save up to 12 million lives

KALA-AZAR $30 million to fight this usually fatal illness caused by a parasite spread by sand flies in South Asia