TIME's Persons of the Year

These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue.

[Re: Bono] - Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time.

[Re: Bill and Melinda Gates] - Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial.

And so another alliance was born: unlikely, unsentimental, hard nosed, clear eyed and dead set on driving poverty into history. The rocker's job is to be raucous, grab our attention. The engineers' job is to make things work. 2005 is the year they turned the corner.

It makes you think that if these guys can decide to make it their mission to save the world, partner with people they would never otherwise meet, care about causes that are not sexy or dignified in the ways that celebrities normally require, then no one really has a good excuse anymore for just staying on the sidelines and watching.

[Full article at TIME's Persons of the Year]