Pledging $3bn (£2.3bn) to fund medical research over the next decade, Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan said their ultimate goal was to “cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century”.
By any reckoning, it’s a hugely ambitious goal. At the event in San Francisco, the couple admitted it might sound crazy, but pointed out how far science and medicine had come in the last century, after millennia with little progress.
Zuckerberg said they had spent two years talking to experts to formulate and plan and this wasn’t “something where we just read a book”.
He acknowledged it would take years before the fund led to any new medical treatments and even longer before they could be used to treat patients.
But how realistic is the target?
“I don’t think it’s realistic,” says Dr Sheena Cruickshank, lecturer in immunology at the University of Manchester, although she adds that it’s “brilliant” that the couple want to invest in medical research.
“Everything changes. Our immune systems change, diseases often change,” she says.
Not only do diseases mutate and become resistant to drugs, but environmental factors like climate change can alter the way infections spread.
“Some of the infections are challenging to deal with because we don’t understand fully how the mechanism of infection works,” she says. There are large gaps in human knowledge. No-one quite knows why some people will become ill if exposed to some strains of the common cold while others won’t, for instance.
