Zuckerberg’s strategy to cure all disease by 2100

This article summarizes an episode of a16z’s video series featuring Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.

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Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) believe the biggest problem in curing all disease is a lack of basic tools everyone can use. Their plan is a new way to fund science. They pay for big computing systems that governments and labs cannot build alone.

The failure of traditional science funding

The current way science is funded favors short-term projects and makes it hard to build tools for the future.

A mission met with disbelief
When CZI announced its goal to cure, prevent, or manage all disease, scientists doubted them. The goal seemed to ignore how research works.

Chan states, “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. 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.”

The limits of government funding
This doubt came from the way most science is funded today. The system was designed for small steps forward instead of big breakthroughs.

Zuckerberg notes, “the vast majority of funding comes from the government and NIH [National Institute of Health] grants. It’s parceled out into these relatively small grants that allow individual investigators to investigate usually pretty near-term things. The development of new types of tools… [is] longer term, oftentimes more expensive to develop. Think about on the order of a hundred million to a billion dollars over a 10 to 15 year period.”

Building biology’s missing infrastructure

This funding gap created an opportunity. They focused on building tools that no single lab could afford to build on its own.

The search for a common language
Before building complex tools, science needs a shared guide. The team realized that biology was missing a single map to organize its many different types of data.

Zuckerberg explains, “it’s kind of this crazy thing that we’re here in 2025 and there’s not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology. That was a lot of the inspiration for it… [We asked,] ‘how do we pull together and standardize a format where you can have all this data?'”

A tool that became a community
CZI’s first plan was to build a software tool, Cell by Gene, to help researchers label their data. The project started with a small goal, but it grew into a community after it was released.

The virtual cell master plan

The Cell Atlas, aproject to create a “periodic table” of all human cells, provided the foundational data for their next goal. They are building virtual cell models to speed up how science is done.

The CZI Biohub, a network of research institutes CZI created, follows a plan to create more advanced virtual cell models. This creates a cycle where collecting data improves the AI, and the AI helps collect more data.

An organizational model for innovation

A strategic bet on computation over space