Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, announcing their initiative to cure disease. (Photo : CZI)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan-Zuckerberg, have pledged to spend $3 billion over the next decade to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime."
This incredibly ambitious and totally praiseworthy goal was announced by the couple during an event in San Francisco for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), their philanthropic and political action company focusing on health and education.
In December 2015 after the birth of their first child, Max (a daughter), the couple pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares valued at $45 billion to the CZI.
As part of this investment, the couple will spend $600 million to build a research center in San Francisco called the Biohub. This center will be a partnership with the University of California San Francisco, Stanford University and University of California Berkeley.
Biohub will develop new tools to measure and treat disease, said Dr. Chan.
"We'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease. As a pediatrician I've worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives."
Joseph DeRisi, a UCSF biochemist, and Stephen Quake, a Stanford professor of bioengineering, will run Biohub. The center's first two research projects are The Cell Atlas (a map of the different types of cells that control the body's major organs) and the Infectious Disease Initiative.
This initiative will explore new approaches and develop new tools for creating drugs, diagnostic tests and vaccines that could aid the fight against such threats as HIV, Ebola and Zika.
"Future scientific advances likely will be at the interface of different disciplines -- a 'convergence' that requires breaking down barriers between fields. This is exactly what Biohub is planning," said David Baltimore, a Nobel Prize Laureate and professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Chan said she and her husband spent two years talking to scientists.
"We believe that the future we all want for our children is possible," said Dr. Chan.
"Can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime? That doesn't mean that no one will ever get sick. But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less. And that we should be able to detect and treat or at least manage it as an ongoing condition."
Dr. Chan, the daughter of a Chinese-Vietnamese couple that fled Vietnam to escape communism, said the goal is to "work together to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime." She said her experience as a pediatrician made her even more determined to work with scientists and engineers to build new tools that can save lives by the end of this century.
Zuckerberg, who spoke after his wife's remarks, said both of them want to "make a better future for our children."
Zuckerberg said his vision for eradicating disease includes bringing engineers and scientists together to more swiftly build new tools to advance efforts to tackle leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, infectious diseases and neurological diseases.
"Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths. We can make progress on all of them with the right technology," said Zuckerberg.
He also called for investments in artificial intelligence (AI) to probe the brain; machine learning to explore cancer genomes; computer chips to detect infectious disease and bloodstream monitors to catch diseases.
Zuckerberg said their campaign is a long-term effort.
"We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades," he said. "But it will take years for these tools to be developed and longer to put them into full use. This is hard and we need to be patient, but it's important."
