Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Orbinski urged students to recognize the dignity of their fellow humans and to work toward change in world health care systems in the closing keynote speech of this weekend's Harvard-MIT conference on international health.

Orbinski, the director of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), painted a dire picture of the state of health around the world in his address.

The speech focused on what Orbinski called "structural forces that drive inequality in health care," and on MSF's mission to remove these barriers.

"MSF refuses to remain silent and morally neutral in the face of inhumanity," Orbinski said.

MSF, the world's largest independent international relief agency, works in developing countries to provide aid to victims of natural disasters, epidemics and armed conflict, as well as to many without sufficient health care.

Orbinski described the four-pronged goal of his organization--whose name means "Doctors without Borders" in French--as being "firstly, to relieve suffering; secondly, to restore the autonomy of the individual; thirdly, to relieve injustice; and fourthly, to seek and locate political responsibility."

He predicted that a quarter of the world's population will live in abject poverty by 2012, a condition he said will be precipitated by urban migration, environmental destruction, infectious disease outbreaks and concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

He then focused his speech on the cost of health care in foreign nations, citing disparities in the prices of HIV drugs as an example.