Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have started an effort to find a cure for all major diseases. The couple has said that they would donate $3 billion to see that major diseases would not be a worry before the end of the 21st century.
According to The Washington Post, the goal of Zuckerberg and his wife is to have all major diseases be gone within the lifetime of our children. This would involve a number of things such as creating tools based on both traditional science and engineering where researchers can build on. There is also a plan to create a chip that can diagnose all, or at least, most diseases.
The effort is called the Chan-Zuckerberg Science wherein a biohub would be created at the University of California at San Francisco Mission Bay campus. The aim of this biohub is to have scientists from Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and UCSF to come together and work out on the many diseases that are out today.
Zuckerberg's wife is a pediatrician and she explains that the goal is to drastically reduce the frequency and even severity of diseases. The aim then would not strictly be to wipe out all forms of diseases.
With the $3 billion it is hoped that it would fund a long-term collaborative effort between researchers from various universities, as Business Insider reports. The first work that would be done is to map out every cell in the human body. That means finding out the locations and functions of each cell.
The effort is said to be ambitious, and it won't be easy either. It has been known that viruses and others that can cause diseases can adapt. This would be one of the challenges that the initiative will face. Zuckerberg seems to be aware of that challenge.
"We have to be patient. This is hard stuff," Zuckerberg has said about the project.
For young scientists, though, this might be good as it would put less pressure on them to bring out results fast. A long-term effort would have more time then for research without the pressure of producing results at once.
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