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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Pledges $3 Billion to Fighting All Human Diseases

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced that he will3 invest $3 billion over the next 10 years in research to prevent all forms of disease.

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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, was launched as a philanthropic organization in December 2015 for the birth of the couple’s daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg, on a mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality.

To reach the goal, it will be appointing Cori Bargmann as President of Science of Chan Zuckerburg Science.

Mark Zuckerberg explained the core health problems facing the world, and how the new program will work on eliminating them. He noted that heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, and neurological diseases are the leading causes of death.

“Medicine has only been a modern science for about a century, and we’ve made incredible progress so far”.

“This is going to be a long-term effort“, Zuckerberg said. New opportunities created by the Biohub will focus the universities’ individual strengths around the common goal of developing technologies to cure and prevent human disease.

“That doesn’t mean no one will ever get sick. but it means our children and their children should get sick a lot less”, she told the audience on Wednesday.

The Biohub will bring together engineers and scientists from three prestigious California universities to help the effort. Structured as an LLC, Mark will donate 99% of his Facebook shares, or about $45 billion, to the organization during his lifetime.

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“This is a big goal and we thought this was really aggressive when we got started”, Facebook Inc.co-founder Zuckerberg said. We’ll be investing more than $3 billion to achieve our collective vision. At the lab, called Biohub, engineers and researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, will create tools for researchers. It will serve also as a central point for collaboration across several disciplines; led by Joseph DeRisi-who has PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics-and Stephen Quake-who has a Dphil in Bioengineering and Applied Physics, and Physics. “This is hard and we need to be patient, but it’s important”. “But it will take years for these tools to be developed and longer to put them into full use”, he wrote. Joining Zuckerberg on stage at the press conference was Bill Gates, whose foundation is also working to eradicate disease.

Mark Zuckerberg and Wife Priscilla Chan Pledge $3 Billion to End Diseases