Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease

**Mark Zuckerberg** (0:00)
This is a space that I think that there's just going to be a huge amount of leverage with AI. It still seems like there could be a lot more effort in this space around building tools, and it's kind of this crazy thing that we're here in 2025, and there's not the periodic table of elements equivalent for biology. We think that this is probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build.

**Priscilla Chan** (0:23)
When we first set out the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight face.

**Vineeta Agarwala** (0:32)
They're like, you're crazy.

**Priscilla Chan** (0:33)
Yes. And it was true, because if you just decided to spend the money funding the next best grant for every single lab in the country, there was no pathway to that being true.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (0:45)
The biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious, and then the AI folks are like, well, that's kind of boring. That's just automatically going to happen. I know, there's something in between there that needs to be bridged.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:00)
For our summer replay series, we're bringing back one of our favorite conversations from the past year. As AI continues to reshape nearly every industry, one of its most important applications may be in science itself. In this conversation, Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan discuss the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's long-term effort to accelerate scientific discovery by building new tools for biology. Rather than focusing on individual therapies, they're investing in the infrastructure, datasets and AI systems they believe researchers will need to make faster progress against disease. We explore cell atlas, virtual cell models, Biohub and the idea that the future of medicine may depend as much on better tools as on better treatments.
Mark, Priscilla, welcome to the a16z podcast.

**Vineeta Agarwala** (1:50)
Thanks for having us.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (1:51)
Yeah, great to be here.

**Vineeta Agarwala** (1:53)
All right. Excited to have you. You're doing exciting stuff.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (1:55)
Yeah.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:56)
To that end, almost a decade ago, you guys started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with the mission and intent to cure, prevent, manage all disease by the end of this century.
There's a lot of missions that you guys could have poured your time and resources into. Take us behind the conversations of why you guys picked this one. Maybe Priscilla, why don't we start with you and your side of the story.

**Priscilla Chan** (2:15)
It always surprises people when I talk about how we work in basic science research. I trained as a pediatrician and people always think, oh, it must be about medicine. And for me, I went into medicine because I wanted to improve people's lives. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be able to help others.
And I think training as a pediatrician at UCSF, I met a lot of patients and frankly, like little kids and families for which we just had no idea what the problem was. And they might have a specific gene that they could name if they were lucky, or they could be grouped into a bunch of other diseases and there'd be a general sort of PDF they'd print out, like this is what we know. And then it was my job as an intern or resident to try to translate like a few lines of information to how we were supposed to take care of the patient. And for me, that's when I really realized the power of basic science and how we need to work on basic science to advance the forefront of what's possible. I think of it as the pipeline of hope.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:18)
Yeah.

**Vineeta Agarwala** (3:19)
And why did you think you could cure all disease? Because that's like a very like aggressive goal.

**Priscilla Chan** (3:24)
Do you want to answer that one?

**Erik Torenberg** (3:25)
Yeah.

**Mark Zuckerberg** (3:25)
Well, I mean, we're not going to cure all diseases, to be clear. I mean, the strategy is to help scientists and the scientific community cure all diseases. So the strategy is really one of accelerating the pace of basic science. And the theory that we had was, if you look at the history of science, most major breakthroughs are basically preceded by the invention of a new tool to observe phenomena in a new way. Right? So think about things like the microscope, right? Being able to observe bacteria or other fields, the telescope or, you know, but it's just to use an engineering example.
Without those kind of tools, it's kind of like you're coding without being able to step through the code.