Facebook’s Zuckerberg, wife Chan to invest US$3 bn to cure diseases
When Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and his pediatrician wife, Priscilla Chan, had their daughter, they pledged to allocate 99% of their wealth to philanthropic causes such as promoting equality and curing diseases during their lifetimes.
At a recent event held in San Francisco, California in the US for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple announced their pledge to spend more than US$3 billion over the next decade to work on curing diseases.
Onstage during the event, Chan recounted the times when she’s had to tell parents their child couldn’t be resuscitated, or give a diagnosis of leukemia.“Can we work together to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime?” she asked, adding that they believe it is possible.
The couple plans to work with scientists, doctors, engineers and universities to achieve their goal, in part by building tools and technology. The program will be overseen by Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York.
“This is a big goal and we thought this was really aggressive when we got started,” Facebook Inc. co-founder 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.
The first investment in science worthUS$600 million will be made over the next 10 years to fund a research center, called the Biohub, where experts from different fields can collaborate on scientific questions. The center is being created as a partnership with Stanford University, University of California at San Francisco and UC Berkeley, according to an official statement.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the world’s richest man, also appeared onstage at the event to support the initiative. Gates has donated more than $30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which works to fight hunger, disease and poverty, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“Only through science can we get an HIV vaccine or a malaria vaccine,” Gates said. “We desperately need this science. Their vision, their generosity, is really inspiring a whole new generation of philanthropists that will do amazing things.”
Zuckerberg, who ranks fifth among the world’s richest people, said there’s the potential to invest in tools that could be applicable to understanding and solving many diseases, such as artificial intelligence software to learn more about how the brain works, continuous bloodstream monitoring to catch diseases early, and a map of all the different cell types in the body to help researchers who are designing drugs.
“It’s going to be years before the first tools get built, and years after that before they actually get used to cure diseases,” he said.
The couple has also already started their initiative in education, with the country’s former deputy secretary of education, Jim Shelton, overseeing their efforts.
