MARK Zuckerberg writes...
Priscilla and I launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative science program five years ago with a long-term mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children's lifetimes.
Our projects for the first five years were about figuring out how we could accelerate progress by bringing together science and engineering. Now that we have a sense of what approaches work best, we're going to focus our next decade on building tools and technologies to help scientists observe human biology in action.
When I'm working on complex problems, I've always found that it helps to set aside time upfront to build tools to measure what I'm working on. I think the same goes for biological systems as well.
As an engineer, it's hard to imagine debugging code without being able to step through it, and we want to equip scientists with those same tools for biology as well.
For example, we want to help scientists see a white blood cell attacking a cancer cell, or see cells replicate in real-time. We haven't seen this happen inside a living person before, but it will be possible with the right tools and technology.
To build these tools, we're launching a few new initiatives for the next phase of our science program:
First, we're creating the Chan Zuckerberg Institute for Advanced Biomedical Imaging. The idea is to bring together experts in artificial intelligence, physics, and engineering to develop new imaging technologies that will let us see things that are not possible today, including at very high resolutions and inside living people. We will ensure that these tools are open and broadly available to the scientific community.
Second, we're launching the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network to build on the success of the first Biohub, which brings together top researchers and engineers from leading universities to develop new scientific tools, including for infectious disease sequencing and single-cell biology.
With the Biohub Network, we'll build several new Biohubs in the coming years to take on new grand challenges to observe and measure different aspects of human biology on 10-15 year time horizons. We'll also expand the San Francisco Biohub over the next 10 years.
Third, we're starting the Kempner Institute for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard. The idea is to bring together neuroscientists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and more to understand the basis of what intelligence is.
By studying this across both human and artificial intelligence systems, we hope to improve both and accelerate scientific progress overall.
Priscilla and I will share more about these new programs over the course of this week. If you want to learn more about this and the progress we've made over the last five years, you can tune into our virtual science symposium this morning at 10 am PT at: https://czi.co/ScienceSymposium