Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and their daughter Max, who was their inspiration to found the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
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The Facebook Chief Executive said the couple would be investing in a bioscience research centre with the aim to “cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime”. To this end, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, their philanthropic organization, is committing $3 billion over the next decade to help accelerate basic science research.
The first investment is in Biohub, a new center at UC San Francisco that will develop new tools to measure and treat disease.
The Biohub will be led by University of California, San Francisco professor Joseph DeRisi and Stanford University professor Stephen Quake, whose work includes small molecule screening and biological measurements. Neurobiologist Cori Bargmann is signing on as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s president of science.
She explained: “In those moments and in many others we’re at the limit of what we understand about the human body and disease, the science behind medicine, the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering”.
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. “Mark and I believe that this is possible”.
The couple decided a year ago to donate 99% of their wealth, which at the time was valued at more than 45 billion dollars (£34.7 billion), to the Chan Zuckerberg philanthropic ventures.
The investment marks the next major philanthropic effort for the couple, who announced in December that they planned to give away 99 percent of their wealth over their lifetime.
The mum-of-one became emotional during her speech as she spoke about her parents moving to the States as Vietnamese-Chinese refugees and said that the project was “close to her heart”.
“We spend 50 times more on health care treating people who are sick than we spend on science research (to cure) diseases so that people don’t get sick in the first place”, Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg, made it clear that it is a long term process and may take more than a decade to be able to see visible results.
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Zuckerberg said their organization is “building a world-class engineering team” to help scientists and medical experts research diseases. Meanwhile an Infectious Disease Initiative is created to develop new vaccines and tests. There, they will work on creating tools that can be used to find cures for all diseases. “This is hard and we need to be patient, but it’s important”, they noted.
