In an emotional misty-eyed Facebook Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Dr. Priscilla Chan last week announced in San Francisco that she and her husband will be be investing $3 billion over 10 years to build tools to cure, or manage all diseases within their children’s lifetime. “We believe the future we all want for our children is possible, ” she said.
Around 63, 000 people watched the event on Facebook Live, while the event was attended by 450 people including prominent business and political persons, including Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.
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Chan, who is a paediatrician said “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.”
Chan Zuckerberg Institute, which is a limited liability company, was founded after the birth of their newborn daughter Max (short for Maxima). The couple unveiled the plan in an open letter to thier child, in a Facebook post. They promised to give away all of their $46 billion in Facebook Inc. shares, setting a new philanthropic benchmark.
The couple also introduced the world to the new president of Chan Zuckerberg Science “One of the world’s most respected neuroscientists and geneticists”, Neurobiologist Cori Bergmann.
“I’ve always been a really curious person, ” said Bargmann, a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York who studies the biology of the brain. “You can put anything in front of me, and I’ll read it. The first time I went into a scientific laboratory and I realized that I could discover things that no one had ever discovered before, that just satisfied my curiosity in the most gratifying way. And I’ve never looked back.”
The first investment of $600 million goes to research center called Biohub, in partnership with Stanford University, Berkeley and the University of California. The Biohub will focus on building new tools to understand and treat disease.
Similar Initiative bases on public health led Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who donated $10.2 billion in 2014 through global health initiatives for fighting chronic diseases like Malaria, AIDS and Tuberculosis.
