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"Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” The pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and the fifth richest man in the world, think the answer is yes. On September 21, 2016, they went to a San Francisco auditorium to announce the donation of $3 billion to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI. It won’t cure all diseases, but it’s a large sum — about as much as the cost of the Human Genome Project. The CZI will support high-tech, blue-sky research using genomics, sophisticated databases, and other cutting-edge methods.
Zuckerberg set out the philosophy that will guide the CZI toward this North Star. His slide read: “engineering + social change.”
Zuckerberg explained that he believes engineering leads to social change. The social change he wants to see is better health. “That doesn’t mean that no one will ever get sick,” he said. “But it does mean that people should get sick a lot less.” The promise of CZI is that more diseases will be eradicated, new drugs will cure, treat, or manage...