Mark Zuckerberg Made Us All Friends—Now Can He Rid the World of Disease?
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, want to rid the world of all disease by the end of this century-and they're pledging $3 billion of their fortune to the ambitious goal.
Over the next 10 years, the Facebook CEO and his pediatrician wife will donate about six percent of their net worth of $55.2 billion toward advancing scientific research to "cure, prevent or manage all disease" in the next 80 years, the couple announced yesterday at an event in San Francisco for the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
The money will be specifically used to create research tools - from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques - they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.
At current rates of progress, Zuckerberg reckons, it will be possible to solve most of these problems "by the end of this century." Zuckerberg and Chan have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavor. In an interview, Zuckerberg emphasized "that this isn't something where we just read a book and decided we're going to do."
"This is a big goal and we thought this was really aggressive when we got started," Zuckerberg said. "But when you get into it, one of the first things that strikes you is medicine has only been a modern science for about a century." After speaking with experts, the couple believes it's possible, he said.
Through their philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the commitment includes $600 million to fund a new research center in San Francisco where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on projects spanning years or even decades. The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific ailments, such as bone cancer or Parkinson's disease, but rather to do basic research. One example: a cell atlas that maps out all the different types of cells in the body, which could help researchers create various types of drugs.
Chan's work as a pediatrician seems to be a big driver in the couple's decision to take up this latest cause.
"I've been with families where we've hit the limit of what's possible through medicine and science," Chan said. "I've had to tell families devastating diagnoses of leukemia, or that we just weren't able to resuscitate their child."
Zuckerberg and Chan hope that their effort will inspire other far-reaching efforts and collaboration in science, medicine and engineering, so that basic research is no longer relegated to the margins.
"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.
Eric Lander, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he's had some 20 conversations with Zuckerberg and Chan over the past year about the initiative and called it "the right kind of goal for thinking about that kind of timeframe." He is not involved with the project itself, but expressed confidence in it.
Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote in the journal Science that private efforts such as Zuckerberg and Chan's could help supplement government funding and "initiate research thrusts into unproven directions, which generally do not draw government funding."
Their new center, Biohub, will run as an independent research center at the University of California, San Francisco in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Zuckerberg and Chan had previously committed to donating 99 percent of their wealth , stressed that they believe that their goal can be accomplished, if not in their lifetime, then in their child's lifetime. It was their daughter Max's birth last November that inspired the billionaire couple to give away nearly all their money to help solve the world's problems.
With reporting from the Associated Press
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