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Culture September 22, 2016
While the rest of the world is distraught by the Brangelina split, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, have committed $3 billion to help cure disease worldwide. (We hereby christen them “Priscillaberg” – and sorry Mark, since we are ENTITY, the wife’s name comes first!) Although Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s celeb divorce is dominating national headlines, Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are showing just how powerful of a couple they are through their latest philanthropic venture. They are changing the world… again.
Just last year, Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan pledged to give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during their lives” to charity and formed the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to manage the money. At the time, the social media business was valued at $45 billion. This commitment was expressed in an open letter addressed to the soulmate’s newborn daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.
In the letter, they wrote, “Our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality.” But in order to do this, the two acknowledge that they must make long-term financial investments, engage with the women and men they serve, build new technology to support change and “take risks today to learn lessons for tomorrow.”
The couple’s newest “risk” is their decision to invest at least $3 billion dollars over the next decade in order to prevent, cure or manage all diseases by the end of the century. According to The New York Times, this is the organization’s first major initiative in science. When Dr. Priscilla Chan announced the health initiative, she said, “We want to dramatically improve every life in Max’s generation and make sure we don’t miss a single soul. We’ll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease.” These efforts, according to her, are directly in line with the organization’s mission to advance human potential and promote equality.
With this money, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is planning to first work on creating the Biohub, a collaboration between three major research universities: UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University. In Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcement, he shares how the organization is investing $600 million in a new research hub to bring scientists and engineers from the three universities to build the new tools and technologies needed to achieve medical breakthroughs. He writes, “Throughout history, most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools to help us see problems in new ways – like the telescope, the microscope and DNA sequencing.”
As The Atlantic writes, Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan aren’t trying to cure diseases in the way charities focused on a single disease typically do. Instead of funding direct cures to specific illnesses, the couple’s new initiative is dedicated to funding basic science research that asks questions like “how cells divide or how proteins fold.”
In response to this method, NIH director Francis Collins explains (via The Atlantic), “Most philanthropic efforts are rather targeted toward specific diseases that the philanthropist is interested in. It’s unusual for philanthropy to support a lot of basic science, and yet the future of everything we hope to see happen in medical research depends upon a vigorous agenda in the basic arena.”
However, although Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are just now making their first endeavor into medical science, they are no strangers to philanthropy. Even before the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the inspirational couple has been donating money to several education and health-related causes.
For instance, they started a school in one of Silicon Valley’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. According to Zuckerberg (via CNN), this school’s main goal is to “bring education and healthcare together” because they believe “health and education are closely connected.” In addition, the couple created a trauma center in San Francisco General hospital, where Dr. Chan worked as a pediatrician. The new Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center now provides inpatient, outpatient, emergency, diagnostic and psychiatric services for both adult and children.
Not only that, but Zuckerberg has extended his philanthropic efforts globally. He spent the past few years in the developing world, where 4.2 billion women and men don’t have access to the Internet. According to Mic, he has hosted both Indian and Chinese leaders in an attempt to position Facebook as the first source of access.
But regardless of what their next philanthropic endeavors are, Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan’s main concerns involve making their daughter’s generation a better one. As the couple writes in their letter, “Max, we love you and feel a great responsibility to leave the world a better place for you and all children. We wish you a life filled with the same love, hope and joy you give us. We can’t wait to see what you bring to this world.”
