Facebook CEO and wife commit 3 billion USD to medical research

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said on Wednesday it would commit 3 billion U.S. dollars over the next 10 years to help cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the 21st century.

An emotional Priscilla Chan, wife of Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Facebook, Inc., told an event in San Francisco about her educational experience growing up in a Chinese-Vietnamese family, and experience as a pediatrician and as a mother.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, was launched as a philanthropic organization in December 2015 for the birth of the couple's daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.

The new program, called Chan Zuckerberg Science (CZS), will bring together teams of scientists and engineers to build new tools for medical research.

Saying that "as a pediatrician I've worked with families at the most difficult moments of their lives," Chan pledged "we'll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease."

"We can do better than that," Zuckerberg said about research funding and the status quo that the United States spends 50 times more on treating people who are sick than on finding cures so people do not get sick in the first place.

Of the 3 billion dollars donation for CZS, 600 million dollars will be for Biohub, a new research center at the University of California, San Francisco, which will be joined by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Cori Bragmann, a neurobiologist, will head the CZS. She told the audience that output from the organization will be available to all doctors and researchers. Endit