Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, have announced a very ambitious plan: They want to stop all diseases.
As part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple will give more than $3 billion to “cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime.” Discussing the emotional scenario of a doctor delivering difficult medical news to the parent of child, Chan said at a recent event announcing the plan, “In those moments and in many others we’re at the limit of what we understand about the human body and disease, the science behind medicine, the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering. We want to push back that boundary.”
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg explained (you can read the whole thing here):
Priscilla and I have spent the last few years talking to dozens of top scientists and experts who believe it’s possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century. That doesn’t mean no one will ever get sick, but it does that mean that we’ll get sick a lot less, and that when we do, we’ll always be able to identify and treat the problem, or at least manage it as a non-harmful condition …
We’re going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build new tools that can empower the whole scientific community to make breakthroughs on the four major disease categories.
… After years of learning about these problems, talking to top scientists and experts, reading everything we could get our hands on, and getting into the math of how science is funded, we are optimistic that it is possible to cure, prevent or manage all disease in our children’s lifetime.
