Mark Zuckerberg (R), founder and CEO of Facebook, and wife Priscilla Chan arrive on the red carpet during the 2nd annual Breakthrough Prize Award in Mountain View, California November 9, 2014.
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Speaking Wednesday at an event on the campus of the University of California, San Francisco, Chan, who is herself a pediatrician, said the goal of the couple’s investment is to “cure, prevent and manage” all disease by the end of the century. The first project will be the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, an independent research centre in San Francisco that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others. The science initiative will be headed by Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist who studies the biology of the brain.
The CZI was first announced in December a year ago alongside the birth of the couple’s daughter Max.
“I have no doubt we’ll make great progress on these diseases”, Gates said.
“The plan is to bring scientists and engineers together, build tools and technology, [and] grow the movement to fund science”, he said.
The first investment is in Biohub, a new center at UC San Francisco that will develop new tools to measure and treat disease. “That doesn’t mean no one will ever get sick, but it does mean our children and their children will get sick a lot less”.
The couple announced its pledge to give away 99 percent of their wealth over the course of their lifetimes to coincide the birth with of their daughter, Max, around Thanksgiving 2015.
And it is wonderful that today they are taking on another bold challenge, this idea of curing and preventing all diseases by the end of the century.
“Only through science can we get an HIV vaccine or a malaria vaccine”, Gates said. “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is already doing some very promising work in improving the education of all students”.
The majority of deaths are caused by heart disease, infectious disease, neurological disease, and cancer, so those are the areas where the program will concentrate its efforts.
Zuckerberg and Chan stressed that they believe that their goal can be accomplished – if not in their lifetime, then in their child’s lifetime.
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The couple say the $3 billion is just a start, and that they plan to invest billions of dollars over decades. The focus will be on “transformational technologies” like a cell atlas that could help map and research the characteristics of every cell in the body. As Gates said: “We desperately need this science”. “But it will take years for these tools to be developed and longer to put them into full use”.
