Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease
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What is the Chan‑Zuckerberg Initiative’s vision for curing all disease by the end of the century?
This is a a a space that I mean that there's just gonna be a huge amount of leverage with AI, it still seems like there could be a lot more effort in this space around building tools and it's kind of this crazy thing that we're you know Here in you know twenty twenty five and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology. We think that this is like probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build.
When we first set out that the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, people like honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight face.
And because crazy.
Yes. And it was true because if you just decided to spend the money funding the next best grant for every single lab in the country, like you there's no pathway to that being true.
The biology folks I think looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious and then the AI folks are like, Well, that's kind of boring. That's just automatically gonna happen. I
mean that's like okay there's something in between there that needs to be bridged.
The scientific community needs fundamentally new tools to cure disease, not just more funding. For decades, biological research has been constrained by the same limitations. Small grants that fund incremental progress, isolated labs working on narrow questions, and a lack of shared infrastructure to tackle the biggest challenges in medicine. But what if we could change that? Today, you'll hear from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on their ten-year journey building the infrastructure for modern biological research. We discuss how they accidentally created the standard for biology data with their Cell Atlas project, cataloging millions of cells in an open source format. We explore why they're betting on virtual cells that let scientists test high-risk hypotheses in silico before investing in extensive wet lab work.
And we dive into BioHub, their play to accelerate discovery by pairing frontier biology with frontier AI. Hope you enjoy.
Mark Brisello, welcome to the ASIC and Z podcast.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, great to be here. Excited.
All right.
Excited to have you.
You're doing exciting stuff.
Yeah. To that end, almost a decade ago, you guys started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with the mission and intent to cure, prevent, manage all disease by the end of this century. There's a lot of missions that you guys could have poured your time and resources into. Take us behind the conversations of why you guys picked this one. Maybe Priscilla, why don't we start with you and your your s side of the story?
It always surprises people when I talk about how we work in basic science research. I trained as a pediatrician and people always think, Oh, it must be about medicine. And for me, I went into medicine because I wanted to m improve people's lives. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be able to help others. And I think training as a pediatrician at UCSF, I met a lot of patients And frankly, like little kids in families for which we just had no idea what the problem was. And they might have a specific gene that they could name if they were lucky. Or they could be grouped into a bunch of other diseases and there'd be a general sort of PDF they'd print out, like this is what we know. And then it was my job as an intern or resident to try to translate.
like a few lines of information to how we were g supposed to take care of the patient. And for me, that's when I really realized the power of basic science and how we need to work on basic science to advance the forefront of what's possible. I think of it as the pipeline of hope.
Mm-hmm. Why did you think you could cure all disease? 'Cause that's like a very like aggressive goal.
Do you wanna answer that one? Yeah,
well well I mean
We're not gonna cure all diseases, to be clear. I mean the strategy is to help scientists and the scientific community cure all diseases. So the strategy is really one Of accelerating the pace of basic science. And the theory that we had was if you look at the history of science, most major breakthroughs are basically preceded by the invention of a new tool to observe phenomena in a new way.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Chan‑Zuckerberg Initiative’s vision for curing all disease by the end of the century?
0:00–7:17
2
How do CZI and the Biohub plan to fund basic‑science projects that are too big for traditional NIH grants?
7:17–15:02
3
Why is the Cell Atlas described as the “periodic table of biology” and how was it built?
15:02–22:55
4
What are virtual cells and how can they let scientists test high‑risk hypotheses in silico?
22:55–30:04
5
How does the Biohub’s “master plan” combine frontier biology with frontier AI?
30:04–36:57
6
Why does CZI believe most diseases should be treated as rare diseases?
36:57–42:29
7
How is the Biohub’s organizational design (AI leadership, cross‑functional labs) accelerating discovery?
42:29–44:43
8
What broader impact could AI‑driven biotech have on the future of medicine and research?
44:43–45:08
Speakers
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