Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, are launching an ambitious effort to spend $3 billion over the next decade to cure disease. Zuckerberg and his wife have pledged to give away 99 percent of their wealth.
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Chan said she and Zuckerberg spent two years talking to scientists. Neurobiologist Cori Bargmann will become the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s new president of science. The Chan Zuckerberg initiative is already doing some very promising work in terms of improving education for all students (and so) that is a really thrilling thing. “We can do better than that”, said Zuckerberg. She was quick to note that the goal isn’t to eliminate disease entirely but to invest in research that will allow for today’s diseases to be cured, prevented and managed.
Zuckerberg said their organization is “building a world-class engineering team” to help scientists and medical experts research diseases. If there’s a chance that we can help cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime, then we will do our part.
The money comes from the $45 billion organization Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan started a year ago to advance human potential and equality.
They acknowledge that this might sound unrealistic, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century – with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on – following millennia with little progress. “This is not something that we simply read about in a book and chose to do”, said Zuckerberg.
The couple recently backed a startup that trains and outsources work to developers in Africa and a programme providing San Francisco Bay Area teachers with cash for school supplies.
To be sure, Chan Zuckerberg Science and its enormous fountain of money is a project with a noble goal, and you’d be hardpressed to find anyone who tries to argue otherwise. “We’ll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease”.
Zuckerberg said that they also want to focus on tools to help scientists make more breakthroughs, including artificial intelligence software for brain imaging and machine learning to help analyze data about cancer genes.
He goes on to say, “We have to be patient”.
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“But, it will take years for these tools to be built and longer to put them into full use”.
