In December 2015, the couple pledged to give away 99 percent of their wealth over the course of their lifetimes to coincide the birth with of their daughter, Max.
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The funds will come from the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, a limited-liability company the couple established past year after the birth of their daughter, with a goal to “advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy”.
Zuckerberg said their organization is “building a world-class engineering team” to help scientists and medical experts research diseases.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative mission statement states: “We want every child to grow up in a better world”.
Saying that “as a pediatrician I’ve worked with families at the most hard moments of their lives”, Chan pledged “we’ll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease”.
Zuckerberg explained that the programme aims to eventually make all diseases treatable or at least easily manageable by the end of the 21st century.
The USA spends 50x more on treating people who are sick than curing diseases so people don’t get sick.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg started as a tech geek, became a running advocate at the start of 2016 and just turned into a disease fighter with wife Prescilla Chan, a medical doctor.
Zuckerberg and his paediatrician wife Priscilla Chan made the announcement about the funding at an event for their philanthropic organisation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
“Science is a long term effort”.
Chan, a pediatrician, said their foundation is contributing $600 million over the next 10 years for a biohub that will bring together scientists, engineers and more from UCSF, UC Berkeley and Stanford University to help tackle these major health problems.
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. The shiny new venture will receive $US3 ($4) billion in funds over the next decade.
Zuckerberg says most people die of four types of diseases: Cancer, heart, neurological, or infectious.
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He goes on to say, “We have to be patient”. Bargmann previously served as co-chair of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, a research effort that sought to cure and treat brain disorders like Alzheimer’s.
