Facebook couple commit $3 billion for bold medical initiative

Dr. Priscilla Chan appeared on the Today Show to explain the plan to spend $3 billion to advance medical research.

THREE UNIVERSITIES in the San Francisco Bay Area are coming together to launch a biomedical science center funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan, his wife. The $600 million center, known as the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, is the first investment made by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic company created last year to improve education and cure disease, among other goals. Researchers at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University, will work together at the center, which will be located on UCSF's campus.

Over the next decade, Chan says the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $3 billion in a sweeping effort to cure all diseases in the lifetime of today’s children.

“We are at the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering,” Chan said Thursday morning at an event in San Francisco. “We want to push back at that boundary.”

Chan and Zuckerberg have been meeting with scientists, doctors, and engineers in hopes of “curing, preventing, or managing all diseases in our children’s lifetime.” In her opening statement at the event, Chan said, “Mark and I believe this goal is possible ... And after we talked with a lot of top scientists, we realized that they do too.”

"Medicine has only been a modern science for about a century, and we've made incredible progress so far. Life expectancy has increased by 1/4 of a year per year since then, and if we only continue this trend, the average will reach 100 around the end of this century," said Zuckerberg on his Facebook page.

"Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths. We can make progress on all of them with the right technology.

"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.

RELATED:

• Priscilla Chan a product of her experience as an outsider
• Facebook couple make a $45 billion pledge to their newborn daughter

"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.

In 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg pledged in an open letter to their newborn daughter to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares during their lives for charitable purposes. “Partnering with experts,” they wrote, “is more effective for the mission than trying to lead efforts ourselves.”

The result is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, saying it would give as much as $45 billion to charity over the course of their lifetimes.

In introducing the broader $3 billion science initiative, Chan, the daughter of ethnic Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam in the 1970s, set the stage, sometimes tearfully, by sharing her personal insights as a pediatrician who has had to deliver such tragic news as telling families their child has leukemia, or that the hospital could not resuscitate their child.

“We want to dramatically improve every life in Max’s generation,” Chan said, referring to the couple’s 10-month-old daughter, Maxima, whose birth last year inspired a commitment from Chan and Zuckerberg to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares over their lives toward improving education and health prospects for this and future generations.

“This doesn’t mean no one will get sick,” said Chan. “But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less.”

###

Priscilla Chan (Zuckerberg) is a product of her experiences as an outsider

Priscilla Chan

IN A RARE interview, Priscilla Chan explains how her goals and the goals of her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, were shaped by her personal story.

Usually, Priscilla Chan prefers to stay in the background while her famous husband basks in the limelight. But the Bay Area News Group was able to get an exclusive interview with one-half of the most richest couples in the country.

The daughter of immigrant parents who were among the boat people who fled communist Vietnam, Priscilla Chan grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, a community with hardly any other Asian/Americans.

"My identity, I felt, was so distinct. I felt very much like an outsider. My family didn't have the same rituals that everyone else seemed to have," she said.

Being an outsider and having to work harder for acceptance became part of her DNA through high school and college and now in her career as a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While at Harvard, she began working with the kids from housing projects It was an eye-opening experience and made her realize that all the tutoring in the world was not going to make the housing projects a safe place in which to grow up.

RELATED: Chan & Zuckerberg to start for disadvantaged youth

She found the same situation in the Bay Area's East Palo Alto and that led to her and Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to found a charter school in the tough neighborhood that will provide more than the 3R's for its students.

To read the entire interview, click here.

Facebook founder, wife make a $45 billion pledge to their newborn daughter

Mark, Priscilla and Max.

ALL YOU PARENTS out there, you already know this: Having children changes you. It changes your outlook on life. It changes your perspective and priorities.

Maxima (Max) Chan Zuckerberg - 7 lbs, 8 oz. - was born Thanksgiving week to the Facebook founder and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan. Still basking in the afterglow of a newborn, today (Dec. 1) they welcomed Max into the world by starting a new charity.

In a moving letter to their daughter on (what else?) Facebook, Mark and Priscilla (Chan) Zuckerberg have pledged to give 99 percent of their Facebook holdings - to making this world a better place for their daughter - and children everywhere - through the use of technology and improvement of health outcomes.

In today's worth, that would be about $45 billion, but that amount will likely grow as Facebook continues to gain in value.

"Your mother and I don't yet have the words to describe the hope you give us for the future," the letter begins. "Your new life is full of promise, and we hope you will be happy and healthy so you can explore it fully. You've already given us a reason to reflect on the world we hope you live in.

"Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today.

"We believe all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today," they wrote. "Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here."

RELATED: Silicon Valley couple start a charter school in disadvantaged community

"As you begin the next generation of the Chan Zuckerberg family, we also begin the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation" they pledged to their week-old daughter. "Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities."

Their public promise already has drawn some noteworthy attention:

The first couple of Facebook has already started giving away some of their wealth. Five years ago they signed onto the Giving Pledge launched by Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft. Those who committed to the pledge, including some of the world's richest individuals and families, promise to give away most of their wealth to charities.

The Zuckerbergs recently donated to San Francisco General Hospital $75 million, the largest single contribution to a public hospital in the United States. It will go towards  a nine storey hospital and trauma center; and they are footing the bill for a new charter school located in East Palo Alto, one of the poorest communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

###

Silicon Valley couple to start a school for disadvantaged youth

HAVE YOU ever dreamed what you would do if you had access to millions of dollars?

Paying off all my debts, would be No. 1 for me; set up my children to live comfortably, then onto the pie-in-the-sky things: travel the world, donate to charities,  (hell, start my own nonprofit foundation), buy/build a house in Hawaii, San Francisco, etc. It's nice to dream.

Here's what Priscilla Chan did: Start a school in the low-income city of East Palo Alto to help the most disadvantaged families of that city.

Priscilla Chan has the millions of dollars as the wife of Mark Zuckerberg. You know, THE Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame.

Priscilla Chan

The multi-billionaires have been donating to charitable causes for a number of years: millions of dollars to New Jersey schools, millions fo college scholarships to undocumented students,  and millions to San Francisco General Hospital where she is a primary care physician.

Chan, a former elementary science teacher who tutored in Boston's housing projects, she has also worked with low-income patients at various hospitals in San Francisco. She soon realized that there was a limit that she could do to help her patients and students, Their problems stemmed from outside the walls of the medical facility or school. 

Chan recognizes - as numerous studies have shown - there is a link between a child's ability to learn and that child's physical and mental health. Health is impacted by a variety of ills - violence, diet, dysfunctional family life - that can't be cured by pills or injections. 

"There is something physiologically happening early in life that changes a child's trajectory," Chan told the San Jose Mercury News' Sharon Noguchi.

That's why she is partnering with the Ravenswood Family Health Center to get the first batch of students for The Primary School that already has secured a site in East Palo Alto. She hasn't revealed what she is donating to the school, but you can be sure the school won't be lacking for funds.

She hopes that The Primary School could become a model that can be replicated elsewhere.

Not everybody in the 1% can use their vast fortunes to help others less fortunate than they. Its nice to dream, but its even better to be able to make those dreams come true. 

###