As part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Wednesday pledged more than $3 billion toward a plan to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime."
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is the company in which the two have jointly invested shares in.
In 2015, the duo said that that they would give 99 per cent of their Facebook shares to charitable causes.
The initiative is focused on using scientific research for preventing, curing or managing all diseases by the end of the century.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Zuckerberg wrote:
“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. 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.”
He said that this was a long-term effort and that they plan on investing more in the future.
“We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades. It will take years for the first tools to be developed, and then years after that before they are used to cure diseases. This is hard and we need to be patient, but it's important.”
The first announcement was made during an event at the University of California, San Francisco, Mission Bay campus. The event was attended by many eminent personalities including former Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom.
The initiative’s first investment of $600 million will go into creating a bioscience research centre, called the Biohub. It will bring together Bay-area researchers and scientists from the University of California at San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.