The announcement was made with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-founder Priscilla Chan, who is a pediatrician and Zuckerberg’s wife. They formed the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to advance human potential and promote equality that month, but have primarily focused on efforts meant to improve education.
Advertisement
At the event on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that if his organisation’s plan to cure or manage all disease worked, it should increase human life expectancy to 100 years.
“Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths”, Zuckerberg said via his Facebook account, citing cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases and neurological diseases.
“I have worked with families at their most hard moments in their lives, from making the devastation diagnosis of leukaemia to sharing with them that we were unable to resuscitate their child”, she said.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is also appointing Dr. Cori Bargmann to lead its science efforts.
To this end, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, their philanthropic organization, is committing $3 billion over the next decade to help accelerate basic science research. “That doesn’t mean no one will ever get sick, but it does that mean that we’ll get sick a lot less, and that when we do, we’ll always be able to identify and treat the problem, or at least manage it as a non-harmful condition”.
Zuckerberg said the couple made a decision to focus on creating better tools because this is where they see need, based on their conversations with scientists.
The $3 billion will come from Zuckerberg’s personal shares in Facebook – a sum worth more than $45 billion. This is about the future that we all want for our children. We are partnering with scientists, doctors, and engineers to help us achieve this goal.
The first wave of cash will be a $600 million investment in a new initiative called Biohub, a team from Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, tasked with finding new ways to fight disease.
“The more people who believe we can cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime, the more likely we are to get our government to invest in it”.
The first is the Cell Atlas, a “map” that describes the different types of cells that control the body’s major organs. Another Biohub focus will be the Infectious Disease Project, created to respond quickly to problems like Zika and Ebola since governments seem to keep failing to do so themselves.
Advertisement
He goes on to say, “We have to be patient”.
