Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, has promised to make available $3 billion to help scientists cure, prevent or manage all diseases.

Zuckerberg said he would bring scientists and engineers together to develop tools that can enable the scientific community to make breakthroughs on the four major human-afflicting disease categories.

The project will be headed by Cori Bargmann, world-renowned expert in neuroscience and genetics.

While make the announcement on Wednesday, Zuckerberg revealed that Bargmann has joined the Chan Zuckerberg foundation to lead the initiative.

“Priscilla and I have spent the last few years talking to dozens of top scientists and experts who believe it’s possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century”, he said.

“That doesn’t mean no one will ever get sick, but it does that mean that we’ll get sick a lot less, and that when we do, we’ll always be able to identify and treat the problem, or at least manage it as a non-harmful condition.”

“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.

“It’s not hard to imagine the modern tools required to accelerate breakthroughs in today’s four major disease areas. So we’re going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build these new tools and technologies.

“Our first project is creating the Biohub. We’re investing $600 million in a new research hub to bring scientists and engineers together from Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley, and the world-class engineering team we’re building at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in order to build some of the new tools I mentioned above.

“The science initiative is a long term effort. We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades. But it will take years for these tools to be developed and longer to put them into full use. This is hard and we need to be patient, but it’s important.

“Medicine has only been a modern science for about a century, and we’ve already made incredible progress. Think about that. For thousands of years, we made very little progress. Then we started applying the scientific method to investigating diseases and progress really took off. Since then we’ve eradicated smallpox and are close to eradicating polio. We can prevent meningitis, measles and many forms of influenza with vaccines.

“We discovered antibiotics to treat potentially deadly infections like tuberculosis and pneumonia. We produced insulin to manage diabetes, statins to reduce heart disease, and chemotherapies to treat cancer. We’ve reduced smoking through public education. We’ve even found ways to reduce life-threatening diseases like HIV to conditions we can manage.

“Today, most people die from four kinds of diseases: heart disease (10.8 million, 19.2%), cancer (8.2 million, 14.6%), infectious disease (8.5 million, 15.1%) and neurological disease like stroke (6.8 million, 12.1%). Of the rest, almost half are due to accidents and injuries (5.8 million, 10.3%) or otherwise unrelated to disease (3.1 million, 5.5%).

“We’re going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build new tools that can empower the whole scientific community to make breakthroughs on the four major disease categories. Solving large problems requires finding new ways for scientists and engineers to work together, share data and coordinate.

FULL ARTICLE at https://lifestyle.thecable.ng/mark-zuckerberg-cure-diseases-3bn/

Nice one

I wish Zuckeberg can read my signature.