Mark Zuckerberg pledges $3bn to help scientists cure diseases
Billionaire Facebook
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Wednesdaypledged 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment