Zuckerberg: How Silicon Valley Reacts to My $ 3 Billion Fund to End Disease

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan took an important step towards humanity: they announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) would give $ 3 billion to fund a plan to "cure all diseases".

According to Chan, a pediatrician, the goal is not that no one gets sick, but dramatically reduce the frequency and severity of the disease in the world.

Over the next two years, Zuckerberg absorbed a series of criticisms and responses to this ambitious goal. In a recent in-depth interview with the New Yorker, Zuckerberg said residents of Silicon Valley responded in two ways:

"A group of people have the reaction of" Oh, that's obviously going to happen by itself – why do not you just spend your time doing something else? "And then a group of people has the reaction of" Oh, that seems almost impossible – why are you setting yourself so high? "

But Zuckerberg is one for a challenge. The foundation intends to make the projects riskier for scientists, even if they will not succeed until 20 or 50 years from now. "They want to give scientists the opportunity to work as coders in an ambitious start to Silicon Valley," Business Insider said.

In 2017, the non-profit organization Biohub, which committed $ 50 million to 47 scientists, technologists and engineers working at UCSF, Stanford and UC-Berkeley, reported Lydia Ramsey of Business Insider.

Despite the dubious reactions that he has received, Zuckerberg remains positive about this plan.

"On average, every year for about 80 years, life expectancy has increased by about a quarter of a year, and if you believe that technological and scientific progress is not going to slow down, there is an increasing potential for accelerate that, "he told the New Yorker.

He continued, "We are going to reach a point where the life expectancy implied by extrapolating it means that we will basically have been able to handle or heal all the major things that people are suffering and dying of today. From the data we already see, there seems to be a reasonable shot. "

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates seems to agree.

"There are aspirations and there are plans, and the plans vary according to their degree of realism and realism," Gates told the New Yorker about Zuckerberg's goals. As Gates said, Zuckerberg's long-term goal is "very safe, because you will not be here to write the article saying he's done too much."