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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Announce $3 Billion Initiative To 'Cure All Diseases' (venturebeat.com)
Yesterday, researchers on behalf of Microsoft said they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion initiative to "cure all diseases." VentureBeat reports: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a company created by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to "unlock human potential and promote equality," today announced "Chan Zuckerberg Science," a $3 billion project that aims to cure, prevent, or manage "all diseases in our children's lifetime." "That doesn't mean that no one will ever get sick," Mark Zuckerberg later said. But the program hopes to eventually make all diseases treatable -- or at least easily manageable -- by the end of the 21st century. "Our society spends 50x more treating people who are sick than on finding cures. We can do better than that," said Zuckerberg. A press release from the Initiative says Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan will provide "at least $3 billion over the next decade to help jumpstart this work." "The plan," as Zuckerberg called it, is to "bring scientists and engineers together, build tools and technology, [and] grow the movement to fund science." That plan includes a program called Biohub, a partnership between Stanford University, Berkeley, and UCSF that "will focus on understanding underlying mechanisms of disease and developing new technologies which will lead to actionable diagnostics and effective therapies." You can watch the full Chan Zuckerberg Science presentation here.
Wow, spend 3 billion dollars? If only someone had thought of that solution sooner!
He's like a part-time stock trader who just realized how much money you can make with options.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion.
He doesn't think that, and he didn't say that. The quote about "curing all diseases" is taken out of context. If you look at what he actually said, it is clear that he meant that as an aspiration for all of humanity over the next century, not just for his project. So the headline, summary, and TFA are yet more examples of garbage journalism. They are are more than just distorted and misleading, they are outright lies.
The one advantage that a not for profit has is that they can look for cures that might not be profitable.
You mean like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with an endowment of $18 billion and spending of $800 million per year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or the Wellcome Trust with an endowment of 18 billion pounds (~ $23 billion)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with $44 billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And of course there is the research supported by the NIH (that spends $26 billion annually) , NHS etc.
Somehow it seems $3 billion is a rather modest (if welcome) addition to the overall scope of non-profit medical
research...
I know that's an odd subject for this thread, but Texas beat them to this by almost 10 years.
CPRIT (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas) was founded in 2007 and chartered with spending $3B over 10 years to develop new approaches to cancer prevention and treatment. If you're in the cancer research space, you know about CPRIT. It's the single largest research fund for cancer outside the NIH.
To get an idea of what $3B can do, check out the CPRIT site http://www.cprit.state.tx.us/a....
If you don't want to do that, basically you can fund a few companies and a number of research projects, but it's nowhere near enough to make a dent in the problem.
There's also the problem of fairly allocating the funds. CPRIT ran into this problem early on when it was found that many of the early, large grants were awarded without proper review to friends of the board. This prompted the entire scientific board to resign and CPRIT to essentially reset. It's moving along OK now, but it's still an open question as to how many of the investments will yield actionable results.
Given Facebook's proclivity to reward friends with purchases at outrageous valuations, I won't be surprised if this fund runs into the same nepotism issues CPRIT did.
There are many other lessons that they can learn from CPRIT, but the most important probably is that $3T is probably a more realistic number.( See also all the comments about the tech industry's hubris when it comes to these types problems - curing cancer/disease is not the same as slapping together some APIs to create a "world changing" app. )
-Chris