Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan want to rid the world of all diseases: The couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced an ambitious goal of curing, managing or preventing all diseases by the end of the century Wednesday. They acknowledge that this might sound a insane, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century-with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on-following millennia with little progress.
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“But we spent the last few years speaking with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in”. He emphasized “that this isn’t something where we just read a book and decided we’re going to do”. The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific ailments, such as bone cancer or Parkinson’s disease, but rather to do basic research.
Initiative representatives used stage time to discuss some of Biohub’s project ideas, such as building a cell atlas that documents all the locations and properties of cell types in humans, incorporating software engineering into databases and developing engineered human stem cells.
Chan and Zuckerberg made the announcement during an event in San Francisco that was streamed live on Facebook. Their dog, Beast, came by to sit briefly during the 25-minute interview. We set a goal: can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?
Zuckerberg and Chan are part of an initiative called The Giving Pledge, where billionaires pledge to donate more than half of their wealth to charity. He is not involved with the project itself, but expressed confidence in it. For some perspective, it’s worth noting that the yearly budget for the National Institutes of Health is $32.3 billion. “As a doctor, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while”.
The strategy includes $600m the pair has committed to investing in a new research centre called the BioHub. As such, the initiative says its second big focus is on science, and its President of Science will be The Rockefeller University neuroscientist Dr. Cori Bargmann. The facility will bring together engineers, computer scientists, researchers, scientists and others who will collaborate on new research efforts.
Zuckerberg said the couple chose to focus on creating better tools because this is where they see need, based on their conversations with scientists.
Tools, he added, are long-term investments.
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The Initiative’s first major investment was announced in June when it led a $24 million funding round for the New York-based startup Andela, which trains prospective developers in Nigeria and Kenya.
