Chan Zuckerberg Foundation pledges $3 billion
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $3 billion over ten years to "help cure, prevent, or manage all disease" via a program called Chan Zuckerberg Science (CZS). Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan set up this $45 billion organization "to advance human potential and equality". The project aims to bring together scientists and engineers "to build new tools for the scientific community."
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
On December 1, 2015, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter to their newborn daughter and pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, worth $45 billion, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a charitable foundation that focuses primarily on health and education.
Priscilla Chan and Zuckerberg's philanthropy
In 2010, the first major donation was a $100 million gift to Newark's public schools which was reportedly squandered. In 2013, Zuckerberg and Chan gave Facebook shares worth $990 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. In 2014, they donated $25 million to fight Ebola. Zuckerberg and Chan have committed $120 million to Bay Area schools via their foundation, Startup: Education.
Roadmap for advancing healthcare
The first investment will be made in a $600 million research center called Biohub. Biohub will be established in partnership with researchers and scientists from universities like Stanford University, University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. Biohub will bring together scientists, software engineers, provide funding to facilitate scientific discoveries and keep staff to respond rapidly to dangers like Zika virus.
Building "transformational technologies"
The CZS program shall focus on building "transformational technologies" that would result in crucial leaps in treatment and prevention. These technologies would determine tools needed to treat four major disease categories such as cancer, neurological diseases, heart disease and infectious disease. Investments in AI would help understand the brain, machines to analyze cancer genomes, chips that diagnose infectious diseases and bloodstream monitors.
Chan Zuckerberg Science: Curing disease
Priscilla Chan said, "We'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease." She explained that, "As a pediatrician I've worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives" and Chan Zuckerberg Science would aim to eliminate those moments.
