Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have announced the next phase of their philanthropy efforts: curing all diseases in the lifetime of their 10-month-old daughter, Max.
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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife on Wednesday pledged $3 billion over the next decade to help banish or manage all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder’s fortune into innovative research.
The opening project will be a $600 million investment in a medical-focused research facility called the Biohub involving scientists and engineers from Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley, as well as an experienced engineering team from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
In addition, they announced that Cori Bargmann, an expert in neuroscience and genetics, will join the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as the President of Science.
Chan said she and Zuckerberg spent two years talking to scientists.
As part of its plan to “cure all diseases”, the initiative will focus on bringing the scientific and engineering communities together, building new tools and technologies, and providing new avenues of funding for scientists.
In December previous year, Zuckerberg said he will give 99 per cent of his Facebook shares away in his lifetime.
The major diseases they are hoping to tackle are cancer, neurological disease like stroke, heart disease, and infectious disease.
“Consider disease. Today we spend about 50 times more as a society treating people who are sick than we invest in research so you won’t get sick in the first place.”
“They both love science and they are both very committed to where it can take us”, Gates said. Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, they will allow scientists to pursue their research with fewer requirements than typical government or foundation grants, Quake said.
Zuckerberg also wrote a note on Facebook outlining his ambitious plans to “cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century”.
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Structured as a limited liability company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has invested millions of dollars in startups such as Andela, which trains engineers in Africa, and most recently Byju, an Indian ed tech company that created an app that includes video lessons. “We need your help, and it’s an area where we can all do something really important together”. One of the first projects is to create a “cell atlas”, an unprecedented account of the location and molecular make-up of every cell in the human body.
