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In September 2016, Facebook cofounder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced an exceedingly ambitious plan to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.” Zuckerberg and Chan pledged $3 billion to be disbursed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the charitable foundation they had launched the year before.
With that announcement, the CZI joined the ranks of a handful of other philanthropic mega-donors pumping cash into biomedical research labs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has devoted more than $40 billion to research on malaria and other infectious diseases that strike hardest in the developing world, while the Michael J. Fox Foundation has contributed more than $700 million to understanding Parkinson’s disease. Others, like the ...
