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.

Comments

virii

[fluffernutter]

Shouldn't Microsoft actually cure computer viruses before they go on to use the same method for cancer? Just sayin..

Wise man once say

[Pollux]

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

Affordability

[Moof123]

Totally tone deaf given that many treatable and manageable diseases today go untreated thanks to strong profit motives and broken healthcare systems. It is more profitable to squeeze every penny out of the richest half of the desperate and sick people than to set a price that provides modest profit and widespread availability for virtually everyone with the need.

Today there would be a lot more bang for your buck spending the $3B to fight shady patents in medicine, and to bribe politicians into doing the right by the population than finding more treatments that will get sucked into the Wall Street and DC maelstroms of greed and corruption. Until medicine is working primarily for the patient's good with profit secondary (not zero) I don't see our current frigged up mess getting better no matter how many cures we have.

Re:Tech Company arrogance.

[Kjella]

1. Technology isn't alive. You can copy it, test it, break it, completely gut all the parts and rebuild it. Ethically you cannot do that with people and animals. And right now if it dies, it is dead you can't undead yet. Unlike technology, it dies you can bring it back to operational again.

And this one is the blocker for the really interesting research now, which is combating aging. This graph is in Norwegian but it should be pretty understandable, it's number of deaths by age for each sex and in total. If you look at age 1-17 it's almost zero. from 18-40 we get to make our own stupid choices but still very low, 40-60 people start to check out, 60-80 it's climbing rapidly and 80-100 almost everyone dies. If we were all as resilient as 20 year olds we could live 1000+ years, we're fighting disease in a more and more frail body. I'm not saying it's pointless but it will get exponentially harder and harder to improve.

The problem is though that nobody wants to experiment on healthy people that don't suffer from anything but aging, that you're in good shape for a 60yo but considerably worse than when you were 20yo is only natural. Beyond that you should eat healthy, exercise and all those other lifestyle choices we're not going to make any real medical effort to make you young again. Could we for example clone a new heart and give me a heart transplant, for no other reason than it got 50 years less wear and tear? Can we fix presbyopia that from Greek literally means "see like old man"? What about a way regain lost hearing, that almost everyone loses with age?

This is not how you would maintain a car, you don't wait for it to break down first before you start doing anything. Parts have life spans, parts need service, parts that start showing signs of wear and tear gets replaced. Humans? Don't fix it if it's not broke, in fact we often can't even fix it when it's broke. You're just supposed to accept that you're not a spring chicken anymore, half your body's systems are failing and doctors are running around with the proverbial duct tape. At some point we have to try experimenting on making healthy people even healthier, to rejuvenate them. We haven't really started yet and we certainly won't finish in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of anyone I'm likely to meet.