Billionaire Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Wednesday pledged over $3 billion towards helping scientists find a way to cure diseases. The statement released via his official Facebook page:
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.
Want To Promote Your Song?