Zuckerbergs pledge $3bn to end disease

NEW YORK: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged more than $3 billion (R41 billion) towards a plan to “cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime”.

The couple pledged the money as the next big investment by their philanthropic company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is also focused on education, poverty, and equality.

Speaking through tears at a San Francisco event to announce the initiative, Chan said she hoped to spare parents the pain she had seen while delivering difficult news as a pediatrician.

“In those moments and in many others we’re at the limit of what we understand about the human body and disease, the science behind medicine, the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering. We want to push back that boundary,” she said.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, also attented the event.

The first wave of cash will be a $600 million investment in a new initiative called Biohub, a team from Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, tasked with finding new ways to fight disease.

Zuckerberg said science and the medical community had made rapid advancements over the last 50 years, including eradicating smallpox and nearly eliminating polio, without the aid of modern technology.

“Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths,” Zuckerberg added in a posting on his Facebook page, citing cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases and neurological diseases. “We can make progress on all of them with the right technology.”

In December last year, Zuckerberg said he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares in his lifetime. He made the promise in an open letter to his newborn daughter, Max, on Facebook.

He said he would dedicate 99% of his shares in Facebook to “missions” to help cure disease and connect people. – Reuters