Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan unveil plan to spend more than $ 3bn over 10 years to ‘cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime’. Investments will include a bioscience research centre, plans for a microchip to diagnose diseases, continuous bloodstream monitoring and a map of cell types in the body.
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have laid out plans to invest $ 3bn over the next 10 years with the not insignificant goal of tackling all diseases.
“Can we cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of this century?” asked Zuckerberg, speaking in front of a packed lecture theater at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) William J Rutter Center.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will focus on some of the world’s biggest killers, including heart disease, cancer, infectious diseases and neurological diseases.
One of its biggest investments is to be a $ 600m “Biohub” at UCSF, which will bring together scientists and engineers from Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF – which haven’t collaborated in this way before – to develop tools to treat diseases.
The second focus will be transformative technology, all of which will be made available to all scientists everywhere.
“Throughout the history of science most of the major scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by some new tool and technology that allows you to see in new ways,” explained Zuckerberg. “The telescope helped us understand astronomy and the universe, the microscope helped us understand cells and bacteria to help us develop treatments for infectious diseases, while DNA sequencing and editing helps us fight cancer and genetic disorders.”
Zuckerberg suggested that artificial intelligence could help with brain imaging to treat neurological diseases, machine learning could be used to analyse cancer genomes, while chips and blood monitors could identify diseases quickly. “These are the kinds of tools we want to focus on building at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” he said.
Acclaimed American neurobiologist Cornelia Bargmann, who will lead the initiative, gave the example of a “cell atlas”, a comprehensive resource that maps the locations, types and molecular properties of all of the cells in the human body.
“We need this to develop new understanding and cures for diseases in all areas of medicine,” she said.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a limited liability company that the couple uses to make donations and investments to advance their philanthropic causes. It was launched at the birth of the couple’s first daughter Max in December 2015. The couple has committed 99% of their Facebook stock, valued at $ 45bn, to the initiative which makes charitable donations and for-profit investments.
The organization initially focused on the education space, funding Indian company BYJU’s, which helps students learn maths and science and Nigerian company Andela, which trains up African software developers. It has now turned its attention to science.
The organization will achieve its objective by focusing on building tools and technology, bringing scientists from across the world together and growing a movement to fund more science.
Wiping back tears in an emotional opening talk, Chan described her work as a paediatrician.
“I have worked with families at their most difficult moments in their lives, from making the devastation diagnosis of leukaemia to sharing with them that we were unable to resuscitate their child,” she said. “By investing in science today we hope to build a future in which all of our children can live long and rewarding lives.”
Zuckerberg and Chan acknowledged it’s an ambitious undertaking. “It’s a big goal,” said Zuckerberg. However, he said that he and Chan have spent two years talking to Nobel Prize-winning scientists and researchers and believe it’s not unrealistic.
“Can we all together work to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime? We think it’s possible and so do scientists,” Chan added. “It’s not that we won’t ever get sick, but that our children and their children will get sick a lot less.”
Related: Tell us about your life in the red: how do you survive with debt?
Debt: $ 80,000+
Source: College
Estimated years until debt free: Uncertain
I was young, pregnant, married and happy. I had just moved into a beautiful apartment in a tranquil neighborhood. My husband had landed a well-paying job. Then one day, I started to bleed. Days later I learned that my baby, at only five months’ gestation, would not make it.
It was only recently that folks began to recognize a phenomenon known as birth-related post-traumatic stress disorder, but I’ve lived with it every day since I lost my daughter Margaret in 2012. It wasn’t her death that initially brought debt into my life. I had already accumulated debt from student loans and credit cards to help me pay my way through school. Though I made timely payments for a while, I was forced to stop paying when I was faced with two options: pay for food in my stomach, or pay my bills and starve. I chose the former.
Before my daughter’s death, my intention was to begin freelancing and use my supplemental income to pay my debts. But everything happened so fast. We’d only been in that new apartment for a month when she died, many of our belongings still in boxes. Losing our daughter left us broken; and now we had to figure out how much it would cost to cremate our baby, decide if we wanted to spring for the more expensive urn. I could barely stop crying long enough to take a Xanax let alone figure out all these financial logistics. This is how it all went wrong.
We lost Maggie in late September and on 1 December, my husband (who was only given one week to grieve) was let go from his job. I attempted to keep us afloat by taking the first gig I could find, but the money wasn’t enough and we lost our apartment. This meant breaking our lease and subsequently being charged thousands for the rent we would have paid had we kept our old lease. That is, of course, on top of the old card and loan debt I still owed. With every passing day, our debts grew into sizeable monsters lurking inside credit reports, waiting for the moment we might want to do something important like buy a car or find a home.
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More debts accumulated any time we had a lapse in health insurance, a side-effect of lacking stable employment, which is hard to come by when your mental health is suffering. Funny thing is that you need insurance coverage in order to help battle issues like PTSD. How’s that for a catch-22?
Calls from collectors became commonplace, filling me with constant anxiety. My mailbox was full of bills or letters congratulating me on the birth of my child from companies who didn’t realize she was now a pile of ashes in a box inside my closet. I changed my phone number, moved into my parent’s house, ignored the world for a while. When your kid dies, you really can’t care much about what you still owe Sallie Mae. And that joke about being so in debt they’ll want your firstborn? It’s not funny any more.
Life has improved somewhat since my daughter’s death. I’ve started writing freelance on a regular basis and my husband has finally landed a job that will hopefully prove to be stable in the long run. We also now have a two-year old son who, though having spent two months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, is now a happy, healthy toddler. But I still live with PTSD, from the birth and death of my daughter, and the complicated birth of my son.
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Some days it’s hard to make deadlines and juggle clients, hard to be a good mom, hard to breathe. I’m lining my ducks in a row to start repaying my loans and rebuilding my credit. I’m hoping this is the year we can finally move into our own place, and more importantly, the year we can finally get regular, uninterrupted care for our mental health.
