After the birth of their daughter Max in 2015, the Zuckerberg spouses already declared a commitment to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, or nearly $45 billion, to charity. A promise that is following its course, since the young entrepreneur announced on Wednesday September 21 that he planned to offer 3 billion dollars to medical research, over ten years. A way to ensure a better future for his daughter while inspiring other billionaires to do the same.
“It’s an ambitious goal,” agreed the boss of the largest social network in the world, during an event in San Francisco, specially organized for the occasion.
An ambitious approach
The philanthropic couple believe that this new donation to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, their charity, will provide enough means to find “cures for all diseases” by the end of the century, or failing that, to make them manageable. the deadliest. “We’ve spent the last few years discussing this with experts who believe it’s possible,” they said. They hope that this investment will be the first effort of a “collective” approach.
A new kind of research center
The first donation, of $600 million, will fund a biomedical research center (“Biohub”) in San Francisco created to bring together “scientists and engineers to jointly build new tools that will benefit the entire scientific community” specifies Mark Zuckerberg in a long message on the social network.
The “Biohub” will welcome researchers from three prestigious Californian universities (Stanford, Berkeley, and the State of California), who will pool their efforts to make this project, already very marked by its universalist aim, feasible.
“We plan to invest billions of dollars in the decades to come,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “But it will take years for these tools to be built, and even longer for them to operate at full capacity. It’s hard but we have to be patient, it’s important”
A long-term commitment
Founded in December 2015 by the two spouses, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is a philanthropic organization which aims to devote itself to the reduction of inequalities and the eradication of diseases.
Through his successive announcements, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be following in the footsteps of another billionaire who made his fortune in new technologies, the now philanthropist Bill Gates. In 2000, Bill and his wife Melinda Gates, created one of the most important foundations in the world (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), in order to actively engage against poverty and the spread of disease in Third World countries. .
Present at the event, Bill Gates reacted to the announcement by declaring that he had “no doubt that they will get things done”. “Mark and Priscilla inspire a whole new generation of philanthropists who will do extraordinary things,” he added.
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