Zuckerberg and his wife will donate $ 3 billion to eradicate the disease by the end of the century

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chen announced the creation of their own fund - the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). The purpose of the foundation is to save humanity from dangerous diseases by the end of the 21st century. To achieve this goal, $ 3 billion will be transferred to the fund. Following the announcement of the creation of the fund, Princilla Chan explained his tasks.

“Curing all diseases,” she said, does not mean that people stop being ill. The main goal is to drastically reduce the frequency of dangerous diseases, plus reduce the impact of these diseases on the human body.

Prospective studies of scientists will be funded, those whose success is not guaranteed in years or even decades. But if the project looks realistic, and its main task coincides with the direction of the foundation’s work, then the author of such work can expect to receive support.
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According to the Zuckerberg couple, the secondary task of the foundation is to provide doctors with the working conditions that startup participants have in Silicon Valley. “This means that we will support projects with a duration of 20 years or even 50 years,” Zuckerberg said.

The idea is not new. Many research organizations and individual scientists are involved in long-term projects, even without substantial financial support from outside. But now many specialists who are engaged in projects that do not promise to give results here and now will have the opportunity to work quietly, not justifying themselves to investors or partners every month if there are no significant results.

$ 3 billion for large-scale medical research - not as much as it might seem. Especially if you consider the stated duration of most studies. The fund will be able to finance only a fraction of the work currently being done. However, this support is important. The work of the foundation will consist not only in financing interesting research, but in creating new links between research organizations and universities and maintaining existing ones. The fund will be managed by a neuroscientist, Cori Bargmann. Her research has led to important discoveries in the field of genetic treatments for cancer. She recently published several papers on her specialty related to the study of the influence of genes on neurons.

Bragmenn identifies three main objectives of the CZI foundation:

• Forging and strengthening ties between individual teams of scientists and laboratories of various universities for a long time;
• Focusing on developing methods that can eradicate diseases, and not just treat sick people;
• Improving and expanding funding for research programs.

The program of financing scientific research in the medical field of a century is divided into stages. The first stage is called Biohub. The goal that is planned to be fulfilled is to establish cooperation between Stanford , the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley . Collaboration will be to conduct long-term research in the science of disease.

The duration of the first stage will be 10 years. During this time, the fund will allocate $ 600 million. The result of the completion of the Biohub phase will be the mapping of all cells of the human body, indicating their functions. The map will be called the Cell Atlas. It will not be a paper, but a digital document with a volumetric model of the human body. Access to the Atlas will be available to biologists who study the nature of various diseases. The second project from Biohub is the search for tools that could help destroy a number of dangerous infectious diseases.

For the first ten years, the project will support the work of scientists from these three universities on the implementation of ideas that may lead to the emergence of new tools to combat diseases. These ideas are risky and ambitious, they do not guarantee results, and their authors have very few chances to get support from traditional foundations.

It is difficult to say what effect the CZI foundation will have on medical science. The principle of the fund is new, there are practically no analogues. And it is completely unclear whether the money of the head of Facebook and his wife will help save the world from a number of dangerous diseases or not.

The money donated to health care and other representatives of the IT business. For example, the main objective of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is to support and improve the health care system, as well as to overcome hunger in poor countries. The fund's funds were directed to a program for the prevention and treatment of HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis, to fight malaria, to projects on immunization of children in India and Africa, including through the GAVI Alliance, and other initiatives.