Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan want to help eradicate all disease by the end of this century by committing $3 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate basic scientific research.
The goal includes the creation of research tools from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques.they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.
The couple spoke with The Associated Press in their home in Palo Alto, California.
'So if you
even just assume that we'll be able to continue to make progress on
that same trajectory, then that implies that by the end of this century
we will have been able to solve most of these types of things,'
Zuckerberg said in an interview.
He emphasized 'that this isn't something where we just read a book and decided we're going to do.' because they have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavor.
Through the new
center, called Biohub, that will run as an independent research center at the
University of California, San Francisco in collaboration with UC
Berkeley and Stanford University.
The
Chan Zuckerberg science initiative will be headed by Cori Bargmann, a
neuroscientist who is best known in scientific circles for her research
on the behavior of a tiny worm called C. elegans.
Although they are unlikely to
live to see accomplished as it may span to
the next 80 or so years.
'We spend
50 times more on health care treating people who are sick than we spend
on science research (to cure) diseases so that people don't get sick in
the first place,' Zuckerberg said.
They acknowledge that this might sound a crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last centurywith vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on following millennia with little progress.
Zuckerberg and Chan hope that their effort will inspire other far-reaching efforts and collaboration in science, medicine and engineering, so that basic research is no longer relegated to the margins.
Photo credit: AP
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