Philip Chandler Gale (1978 – March 13, 1998) was an American Internet software developer and sophomore student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

By the age of 17, Gale had earned roughly a million dollars' worth of stock options at EarthLink for his ISP programs.

[3][4] The family moved from Los Angeles to New Hampshire when Philip was young, and he showed "an early aptitude for numbers and machines".

Gale got a job in programming at the marketing firm where his father worked, but he had contentious relations with fellow workers, as he could outperform many older programmers and had a tendency to treat people who were not as intelligent as he with contempt.

[5] At 16, Gale wrote a software program called "Total Access", to increase usage of Internet service providers (ISP).

[1][8] He was hired by EarthLink over Christmas break his first year as a student, and took a 3-semester sabbatical from MIT to work at the company, which had been founded by Sky Dayton, a Scientology member and fellow Delphian School alumnus.

[1][7] Before his 17th birthday he declared legal emancipation, which allowed him to exercise stock options worth about a million dollars at EarthLink, which was about to go public.

[1] Also in the fall of 1997, Gale moved out of the fraternity house and room which he had shared with his friend Eric Hu, and into an apartment in Central Square with two other students.

Hu later said that Gale had mentioned suicide in the weeks before his death, complaining about being bored and depressed, and feeling that his state would not change.

[1] For weeks, Gale had been asking classmates how to get access to the roof of MIT's tallest structure, the Cecil and Ida Green Building, which is occupied by the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Department.

[7] On March 13, 1998, at about 7:30 pm in an empty classroom on the 15th floor of the Green Building, Gale brought his portable digital recorder, which he switched on.

[1] Gale then wrote and drew the following on the blackboard: Isaac Newton's equation for how an object accelerates as it falls, along with a sketch of a stick figure tossing a chair.

[5][8][10] Eric Plosky, a student at MIT, was inside an adjacent dorm watching television at the time of Gale's death, and heard a crashing sound.

"take care world, Philip"Gale closed his handwritten suicide note with a smiley face and the words "And stay happy!

"[1] After an investigation and an autopsy by Cambridge police, Gale's death at the age of nineteen,[11] late on the evening of March 13, 1998, was ruled a suicide.

[1] During that period, Ladner reported that Gale hung a poster of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, SubGenius' fictional spiritual leader, on his office door.

According to Ladner, the pair of young men had also done a lot of partying in Los Angeles, and worked for a time on a "pornographic Web site hosted by EarthLink".

Questions arose about the role his Scientology background may have played in his suicide, particularly because he died on the day that adherents celebrate founder L. Ron Hubbard's birthday.

[1][7][9] Gale had been in contact with a reporter for the Boston Herald and had been interviewed as part of a scathing 5-part series titled "Scientology Unmasked", published March 1 through 5, 1998, just days before his suicide[13] by Joseph Mallia.

[20] Lauren McLeod, a reporter with the Concord Journal and friend of Gale's, said that he had been struggling to deal with lasting grief following his father's sudden death from a heart attack in October 1995.

[21] People magazine featured Gale's story in a 2001 series of articles on suicides at MIT, describing him as a music major "so prodigiously bright that he counted few of his much older peers as intellectual equals".

Though it touched on Gale's Scientology upbringing, it mostly focused on the high suicide rate at MIT and student access to health care on campus.

[22] In August 2001, the National Public Radio program All Things Considered noted that, in the wake of Gale's death, MIT had investigated how to deal with issues of student suicides.

[11] The student Eric Plosky commented to NPR: "In many ways, suicide has been looked on as something that's just part and parcel of life at the Institute.