As Mark Zuckerberg aims to build his social network empire into the foundation for a virtual metaverse, his other company is tying itself even more closely to the physical world and the delicate human bodies that reside there.
On Tuesday, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the limited liability company formed to execute the philanthropic vision of co-CEOs Priscilla Chan and her husband, Zuckerberg — announced a significant new investment into its missions of curing, preventing, or managing all disease by the end of the century.
When CZI launched five years ago, the pair pledged to spend $3 billion on science initiatives over a decade, funded through the sale of Facebook (now Meta) stock. Now, they have more than doubled that investment, committing an additional $3.4 billion over the next 15 years to expand CZI’s work to refine technologies including microscopy methods, infrastructure for open data, and sequencing techniques. The funding will also expand the organization’s work into new terrain by building a network of biohubs, a new imaging research center, and a new Harvard institute aimed at both natural and artificial intelligence.
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