Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan pledge US$3b to a lofty goal: end disease by 2100

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a goal that’s even more ambitious than connecting the entire world to the internet: He and his wife want to help eradicate all disease by the end of this century.

Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, are committing US$3 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate basic scientific research. That includes creating research tools — from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques — they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA sequencing have in generations past.

The goal is to “cure, prevent or manage all disease” in the next 80 or so years, a timeframe the 30-something couple are unlikely to live to see. They acknowledge that this might sound crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century — with vaccines, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on — following millennia with little progress.

At current rates of progress, Zuckerberg reckons, it will be possible to solve most of these problems “by the end of this century.” Zuckerberg and Chan have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavour. In an interview, Zuckerberg emphasised “that this isn’t something where we just read a book and decided we’re going to do.”

Through their philanthropic organisation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the commitment includes $600 million to fund a new research centre in San Francisco where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on projects spanning years or even decades. The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific ailments, such as bone cancer or Parkinson’s disease, but rather to do basic research. One example: a cell atlas that maps out all the different types of cells in the body, which could help researchers create various types of drugs.