Bill Gates thinks that medical research is too staid, so this week he gave 104 researchers $100,000 each to develop some off-the-wall techniques to treat the world’s worst diseases, such as diarrhea, HIV, malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. With the aim of supporting research in places affected by such diseases, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving grants to scientists in 22 countries on five continents.

For example, Pattamaporn Kittayapong, of Mahidol University in Thailand, will study how the bacterium Wolbachia, which infects insects, could curb the spread of dengue virus by mosquitoes. And Elijah Songok, of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, will follow up preliminary studies of sex workers. Those data suggested a genetic connection between natural resistance to HIV and markers for Type 2 diabetes.

Despite the effort to spread the wealth around, there still are plenty of the usual suspects in the list of researchers and institutions that received grants. Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California at San Francisco pop up several times.

The prize for most engaging idea might go to Hiroyuki Matsuoka, of Jichi Medical University in Japan. He plans to explore whether mosquitoes can be transformed into “flying syringes,” by carrying vaccines that they would inject into people.

To encourage innovative thinking, the Gates foundation set up a streamlined application process, in which potential grantees submitted a two-page proposal. The names and locations of the applicants were kept from reviewers, who simply judged the projects on the basis of their scientific merits, according to the foundation. —Richard Monastersky