Biohub: The Future of Biology is Open-Source with Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Head of Science Alex Rives

**Mark Zuckerberg** (0:00)
We just want to give tools to the whole scientific community.

**Priscilla Chan** (0:02)
We want to understand how biology works. I want to understand the genetics of this person. I want to understand the risks they have to different illnesses. My goal is to be able to treat the individual as an individual, understand the mechanisms, and be able to intervene.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (0:17)
We'll have a bigger impact by getting this in more scientists' hands quicker, by doing it as open source projects instead. It's not just like there's some factory somewhere that you can pay to produce the data. You actually need to invent new novel scientific approaches. The theory isn't that we're going to cure the diseases. We're not. It's that we want to help accelerate the pace of progress for the whole scientific field.

**Alex Rives** (0:37)
We folded over 1.1 billion proteins and predicted their structures. We didn't design a model for antibodies. We didn't design a model to be able to find one particular target. We just designed a model that could understand proteins.

**Priscilla Chan** (0:50)
If we could design a protein to actually change the physiology, then we can actually cure someone.

**Elad Gil** (1:05)
Today on No Priors, we're joined by Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Alex Rives. We'll be talking about Biohub and all their various efforts to now start applying AI at scale to do world models of cells and different levels of interactions across biology.

**Sarah Guo** (1:19)
Mark, Priscilla, thank you for doing this.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (1:21)
Yeah, thanks for having us. Great to be here.

**Sarah Guo** (1:23)
Alex, congratulations on new missions.

**Alex Rives** (1:26)
Thank you.

**Sarah Guo** (1:26)
You guys made Biohub your primary philanthropic effort and then committed $500 million to this virtual biology initiative. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, why do that and how did you go from we should fund this to this is like who we are?

**Priscilla Chan** (1:41)
So, Biohub in its current form, we're super excited about. We feel like it's a really good fit for who we are and what we bring to the table and what we can achieve together. But this work started 10 years ago when we were thinking about how can we give back. And Mark wanted to build an organization that could cure, prevent and manage all disease by the end of the century.
And we had a series of hilarious meetings with scientists that famous Nobel Prize winning scientists were just laughing at us.

**Sarah Guo** (2:15)
Was that your starting line? We're just going to cure all disease?

**Priscilla Chan** (2:17)
No, no.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (2:18)
And to be clear, we don't think that we're going to be the ones curing the diseases. Our goal was always to build tools that could accelerate the whole scientific fields. That way the scientific field collectively could cure all the diseases. But still, people thought that by the end of the century was a stretch. Now I think it's too conservative.

**Priscilla Chan** (2:36)
And so we kept being like, okay, well, we had these series of funny, awkward, educational conversations where we were like, okay, but why?
Why do you think it's impossible? And just being the person in the room was just like, well, I don't know why. You tell me. Finally, we got people to like, they're like, fine, if you really must know. And we're like, no, we do. It seems so important.
They were like, well, we work in silos. And when you publish, information doesn't get shared. It gets locked up for long periods of time. And we don't have tooling. They gave the example of like, we build a great tool by one postdoc in the lab and it lives on their computer. And when they graduate, the tool is gone. And they just, it was, what we heard was very hard to build shared tools to move science faster, build the shared knowledge base to quickly move science faster. And that's sort of where we begin in thinking about, okay, like if those are the problems, like what can we contribute?

**Mark Zuckerberg** (3:40)
Yeah. I mean, so the original Biohub model was basically focused on long-term tool development by bringing together engineers and scientists across multiple universities to focus on long-term tool development. And basically, it worked. And we started off with CZI doing a number of different things. And I think over time, we just felt like, okay, the science piece is really working. And we just kept on investing more and more and more in it until now it is basically the primary and main thing that we're doing. And we've expanded the original San Francisco Biohub to a handful now at this point. There's New York, there's Chicago.