Frederick Taylor Gates (July 22, 1853, Maine, Broome County, New York – February 6, 1929, Phoenix, Arizona) was an American Baptist clergyman, educator, and the principal business and philanthropic advisor to the major oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Sr., from 1891 to 1923.

[3] Gates served on the boards of many companies in which Rockefeller had a majority shareholding; the latter then held a securities portfolio of unprecedented size for a private individual.

Although Gates is recognized today as a philanthropic advisor, Rockefeller himself regarded him as the greatest businessman he had encountered in his life, skipping such prominent figures of the time as Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.

He moved Rockefeller from doling out retail sums to specific recipients to the wholesale process of setting up well-funded foundations that were run by experts who decided what topics of reform were ripe.

Although Gates never quite lost his religion,[7] he began shifting the direction from religious charities to decidedly more secular pursuits like medical research and education.

Rather than viewing China through the traditional missionary lens of millions of heathens to be converted, Gates placed his faith in science.

Working at the intersection of philanthropy, imperialism, big business, religion, and science, the China Medical Board was his last major project.

The fantastic sum would make Chinese medical care the finest in the world and would eliminate denominationalism influence from the practice of medicine and charity work in China.

He looked for leverage whereby a few millions of dollars would generate significant changes, as in the creation of a new university, the eradication of hookworm because it reduced efficiency or the revolution in hospitals caused by the Flexner Report.