ix and a half years ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, announced a $3 billion commitment to basic science research over a decade, including $600 million to create a biomedical research hub in San Francisco in collaboration with researchers from the University of California at San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. In late 2021 they promised another $3.4 billion toward science.
Much of their scientific giving is built around the idea that better tools, paired with a deeper understanding of human biology, can help accelerate finding cures for diseases, managing them or preventing them altogether. “If you look at the history of science, most big advances are preceded by new tools to observe things, not just in biology but [also] with telescopes and supercolliders,” Zuckerberg explains.
To better understand the role of human cells, researchers at the CZ San Francisco Biohub, led by Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and the head of science for CZI, joined a consortium that has assembled a first draft of the human cell atlas—nearly 500,000 cells from 24 human organs. The atlas “tells us what all the different cells in your body are doing in healthy and sometimes diseased states,” explains Chan.
“This is the opportunity to do science the way we’ve always wanted to do it, with the constraints removed and the creativity just allowed to flow.” —Shana O. Kelley “To get NIH funding you need to have a lot of preliminary data—and you have to have an idea that everybody agrees with,” says Kelley. “That doesn’t happen very often, especially with weird, out-of-the-box ideas that have the potential to be transformative.”
Wow bill gates junior
am thinking i got a man crush 🥰 mark will you employe me
Speaking of aliens 👽