Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a goal that's even more ambitious than connecting the entire world to the internet: He and his wife want to help eradicate¹ all disease by the end of this century.

 

与用互联网连接整个世界相比，社交网站“脸谱”首席执行官马克·扎克伯格有更为雄心勃勃的目标：他和妻子想要在本世纪末帮助治愈人类所有疾病。
 

 

Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are committing $3 billion over the next 10 years to accelerate basic scientific research, including the creation of research tools -- from software to hardware to yet-undiscovered techniques -- they hope will ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs, the way the microscope and DNA² sequencing have in generations past.

 

The goal, which they are unlikely to live to see accomplished³, is to 'cure, prevent or manage all disease' in the next 80 or so years.

 

They acknowledge that this might sound crazy, but point to how far medicine and science have come in the last century -- with vaccines⁴, statins for heart disease, chemotherapy, and so on -- following millennia⁵ with little progress.

 

He and Chan have spent the past two years speaking to scientists and other experts to plan the endeavor.

 

He emphasized 'that this isn't something where we just read a book and decided⁶ we're going to do.'

 

Through their philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the commitment includes $600 million to fund a new research center in San Francisco where scientific and medical researchers will work alongside engineers on long-term projects spanning years or even decades.

 

The goal is not to focus narrowly on specific ailments⁷, such as bone cancer or Parkinson's disease, but rather to do basic research. One example: a cell atlas⁸ that maps out all the different types of cells in the body, which could help researchers create various types of drugs.

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