Andrew Witty is not quite as young or as buff as Anderson Cooper, but he does do interviews in shirtsleeves from the slums of Nairobi and rural hospitals in Uganda.

What makes that unusual is that Mr. Witty is not a roving CNN anchor, but the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-largest drug company.

Besides being the youngest person in such a post  he was appointed in 2008 at age 43  he is also making a name for himself by doing more for the world’s poor than any other leader of a colossus of Big Pharma.

“I want GSK to be a very successful company, but not by leaving the population of Africa behind,” Mr. Witty said in an interview. “In any village hospital, you can see the beds filled with women and babies severely febrile with malaria, staring into space, and you wonder: Who’s taking care of the other children? It’s so obvious, the damage that’s being done.”