Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief
executive officer of Facebook, has promised to make available $3 billion
to help scientists cure, prevent or manage all diseases. He said he
would bring scientists and engineers together to develop tools that can
enable the scientific community to make breakthroughs on the four major
human-afflicting disease categories.
The project, according to him will be headed by Cori Bargmann, world-renowned expert in neuroscience and genetics.
Zuckerberg also revealed that Bargmann has joined the Chan Zuckerberg foundation to lead the initiative.
“Priscilla and I have spent the last few
years talking to dozens of top scientists and experts who believe it’s
possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this
century”, he said.
“That doesn’t mean no one will ever get
sick, but it does that mean that we’ll get sick a lot less, and that
when we do, we’ll always be able to identify and treat the problem, or
at least manage it as a non-harmful condition.”
“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.
“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.
“Medicine has only been a modern science
for about a century, and we’ve already made incredible progress. Think
about that. For thousands of years, we made very little progress. Then
we started applying the scientific method to investigating diseases and
progress really took off. Since then we’ve eradicated smallpox and are
close to eradicating polio. We can prevent meningitis, measles and many
forms of influenza with vaccines.
“We discovered antibiotics to treat
potentially deadly infections like tuberculosis and pneumonia. We
produced insulin to manage diabetes, statins to reduce heart disease,
and chemotherapies to treat cancer. We’ve reduced smoking through public
education. We’ve even found ways to reduce life-threatening diseases
like HIV to conditions we can manage.
“Today, most people die from four kinds
of diseases: heart disease (10.8 million, 19.2%), cancer (8.2 million,
14.6%), infectious disease (8.5 million, 15.1%) and neurological disease
like stroke (6.8 million, 12.1%). Of the rest, almost half are due to
accidents and injuries (5.8 million, 10.3%) or otherwise unrelated to
disease (3.1 million, 5.5%).
“We’re going to focus on bringing
scientists and engineers together to build new tools that can empower
the whole scientific community to make breakthroughs on the four major
disease categories. Solving large problems requires finding new ways for
scientists and engineers to work together, share data and coordinate.
“Most science funding today goes towards
individuals working separately, so there is an open opportunity to fund
larger efforts. Engineering has always been key to tool development.
Today, this increasingly means software engineering. But the current
structure of scientific grants does not encourage big scientific efforts
with world-class engineers teams, like the ones you’d find at great
technology companies.
“The more people believe we can cure all
disease in our children’s lifetimes, the more likely the government is
to invest in it, and the more likely we are to achieve this goal. This
is a place where we need your help, and we can all make a difference
together.
“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.”
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