Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan are making good on a pledge past year to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable causes.
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The couple spoke one after the other at the UCSF Mission Bay campus to unveil the next phase of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, their new LLC created with the sole objective of giving away billions and billions of dollars over their lifetimes.
“It’s not hard to imagine the modern tools required to accelerate breakthroughs in today’s four major disease areas”, he said.
“This is a big goal and we thought this was really aggressive when we got started”, Facebook Inc.co-founder Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said their goal is to cure all disease, or at least turn catastrophic illnesses from terminal to manageable or preventable within their daughter’s lifetime.
Highlighting the fact that the new health initiative is in accordance with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative organization’s key mission to advance human potential and promote equality, Chan said that the aim behind the initiative is to “work together to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime”. And more broadly, this focus on building tools suggests a roadmap for how may go about curing, preventing and managing all diseases in this century.
She said, “We want to dramatically improve every life in Max’s generation and make sure we don’t miss a single soul”.
The commitment includes $600 million (£462 million) to fund a new research centre in San Francisco where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on long-term projects. So we’re going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build these new tools and technologies.
“Because if we could have developed new tools that would allow us to see these categories of diseases, then we can empower scientists all around the world with much faster progress”, he said. We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades.
The Biohub is being funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a company founded by the couple.
Leading the initiative will be renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Now, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be spending $3 billion to cure all diseases from the world.
“We need this to develop new understanding and cures for diseases in all areas of medicine”, she said.
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Alongside Zuckerberg and Chan, there was room for a surprise guest: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has busied himself with his own philanthropic pursuits since stepping down from Microsoft.
