Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Eradicate Human Disease, Here's How

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan recently announced their big mission for the next decades. Both want to eradicate human diseases using artificial intelligence (AI) by 2100.
Mark and Chan will develop a computing system that researchers can use to create a cell catalogue. That way, they can predict what steps should be taken when curing a disease.

"Developing digital models capable of predicting all cell types and cell states from the genome will help researchers better understand our cells and how they behave in health and disease," said Mark Zuckerberg, Co-founder and Co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CJI).

In order to realize this sophistication, the company plans to create a computer system made of 1,000 graphics processing units (GPU). Later this graphics card can analyze healthy and sick cells visually from the database.

They want this tool to eventually be available to the public. So the hope is that researchers can use it collaboratively, in an effort to create new discoveries.

"AI models can predict how immune cells respond to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient's body will respond to a new treatment. We hope this collaborative effort will yield new insights into the basic characteristics of our cells ," said Priscilla Chan, Co-founder and Co-CEO of CZI.

This model will be trained by collecting data that is integrated into software called Chan Zuckerberg CELL by GENE (CZ CELLxGENE). It also provides data on more than 50 million cells and much other useful information.

Anne Carpenter, a scientist from the United States, said she was happy with this news. According to him, what Mark and Chan are doing increases computing resources for biologists.

However, he stated that it was still too early to celebrate. While the plans seem promising, the project is clearly still in its early stages.

"They don't make announcements like, 'We've created a model that does a certain thing.' "Instead, they said 'We plan to create a resource that will be available to biologists to create new models,'" concluded Carpenter.