Mark Zuckerberg pledges $3bn to help scientists cure diseases
Priscilla and I just shared our next major focus for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Can we help scientists to cure, prevent or manage all diseases within our children's lifetime? I'm optimistic we can. Medicine has only been a modern science for about a century, and we've made incredible progress so far.Life expectancy has increased by 1/4 of a year per year since then, and if we only continue this trend, the average will reach 100 around the end of this century.
Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths. We can make progress on all of them with the right technology.
Throughout history, most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by
the invention of new tools to help us see problems in new ways -- like
the telescope, the microscope and DNA sequencing. It's not hard to
imagine the modern tools required to accelerate breakthroughs in today's
four major disease areas. So we're going to focus on bringing
scientists and engineers together to build these new tools and
technologies.
Today, we announced a few steps in this direction: Dr. Cori Bargmann, a
world-renowned expert in neuroscience and genetics, is joining the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative to lead this initiative. We are thrilled to
welcome her.
We are committing to invest $3 billion over the next decade in this initiative to help scientists cure diseases.
Our first project is creating the Biohub. We're investing $600 million
in a new research hub to bring scientists and engineers together from
Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley, and the world-class engineering team we're
building at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in order to build some of
the new tools I mentioned above.
The science initiative is a long term effort. We plan to invest billions
of dollars over decades. 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.
This is about the future we want for our daughter and children
everywhere. If there's a chance that we can help cure all diseases in
our children's lifetime, then we will do our part. Together, we have a
real shot at leaving the world a better place for our children than we
found it.
