Billionaire Zuckerberg decided to rid the world of all disease

Facebook founder donates three billion dollars on research in medicine. Founder and Executive Director of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced at a press conference in San Francisco that over the next ten years will donate three billion dollars in the search for treatment of all diseases .

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The couple engaged in charity is not the first year: in 2015 the amount of their donations for various purposes amounted to $ 1.6 billion. After the birth of her daughter in November 2015, they created Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Charitable Fund, pledging to invest in it 99 per cent of their funds, which currently exceeds $ 40 billion.

This same fund will dispose of the current donation. According to Zuckerberg, the funds will be spent on the development of fundamental research in medicine and bioengineering. Preferred direction of this work will be the creation of advanced tools for further research, which ideally will play the same role, such as a microscope or a sequencer. On the first $ 600 million in San Francisco BioHub research center will be created. It is planned that it medical researchers and engineers from Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco, as well as their hired experts will work together over the long-term perspective projects.

The stated ultimate goal of the initiative Zuckerberg and Chan – find a way to “treat, prevent or control all of the disease before the end of this century.” The couple say they realize the magnitude of the task, but consider it feasible. According to Zuckerberg, medical research over the last century have increased the average life expectancy of people in the quarter, but is still on the treatment of patients spent 50 times more than the needs of the medical science. He also said that the decision on the establishment of the Fund was preceded by two years of consultations with experts.

As noted by NBC News, the amount of investments seem too modest next to the scale of the objectives. Organizations such as the National Institutes of Health US Centers for Control and Prevention of diseases, the Office of Food and Drug Administration, Medical Institute Howard Hughes, the British Wellcome Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical companies spend on medical research is much more than a hundred billion dollars per year, but about the prospects for the treatment of all diseases of speech does not go.

Grant funding of medicine involved many members of the IT business. Apart from the already mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the money for health care sacrificed, for example, the executive director of a leading company on cloud computing Salesforce Mark Benёff and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Connell
The author is an expert on occupational training and a prolific writer who writes extensively on Business, technology, and education. He can be contacted for professional advice in matters related with occupation and training on his blog Communal Business and Your Business Magazine.