hehehe....Mark Zuckerberg and his wife on
Wednesday pledged $3 billion over the next decade to help banish or
manage all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder’s fortune into
innovative research.
“This is a big goal,” Zuckerberg said at
a San Francisco event announcing the effort of the Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative established by the couple.
“But we spent the last few years speaking with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in.”
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan,
had their daughter Max late last year. Shortly after, they pledged to
donate 99 percent of their Facebook holdings or some $45 billion to
“advance human potential and promote equality.”
At Wednesday’s event, Zuckerberg said
their goal is to cure all disease, or at least turn catastrophic
illnesses from terminal to manageable or preventable within their
daughter’s lifetime.
While the funding effort is for the next
decade, Zuckerberg and his wife said they hope to achieve their
objective of by the end of this century.
Chan, fighting back tears at times, said
that curing all disease within Max’s lifetime will not mean children
won’t ever get sick, but it would happen less often and be less severe.
– New tools for researchers –
The first investment being made as part
of what the Zuckerbergs hoped would become a “collective” effort will be
$600 million for the creation of a Biohub in San Francisco where
researchers, scientists and others will work to build tools to better
study and understand diseases.
“Throughout the history of science, most
breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of some new
technology that lets you see things in new ways,” Zuckerberg said,
mentioning the microscope and DNA sequencing as examples.
“Tools also create breakthroughs in how we treat diseases.”
The Biohub will bring together engineers and scientists from three prestigious California universities to help the effort.
“We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades,” Zuckerberg said.
“But, it will take years for these tools
to be built and longer to put them into full use. This is hard and we
need to be patient, but it’s important.”
Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of
Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was
brought on to lead the project.
Zuckerberg took an engineering approach
to the challenge, reasoning that there were a handful of big health
culprits including cancer and neurological disease so it was “pretty
easy” to imagine what types of tools are needed.
He spoke of the potential to put
artificial intelligence to work imaging brains or having machine
learning tackling analysis of genomes.
Zuckerberg and Chan also hoped that their project would power a movement to fund more medical research around the world.
Taking part in the event on Wednesday
was Microsoft billionaire turned global philanthropist Bill Gates, who
has made improving health around the world a top goal at the foundation
he created with his wife.
Gates praised Zuckerberg and Chan for taking on a “very bold, very ambitious” challenge.
“I have no doubt they will make progress,” Gates said.
“Mark and Priscilla, they are inspiring a whole new generation of philanthropists who will do amazing things.”
Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, stood by
her husband as she assured the gathering, which included prominent
medical researchers and local politicians, that her “heart is full of
hope” and that all involved were eager to get started.
AFP
No comments:
Post a Comment