Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease
7/9/202645 min
As part of our summer replay series, we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from the past year.
Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan join Ben Horowitz, Vineeta Agarwala, and Erik Torenberg to discuss the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's ambitious effort to help cure, prevent, and manage disease by the end of the century.
Rather than funding individual breakthroughs, CZI is focused on building the tools and infrastructure that can accelerate scientific discovery across entire fields. The conversation explores Biohub, Cell Atlas, virtual cell models, open biological datasets, and the growing role of AI in helping researchers better understand human biology.
They discuss why biology still lacks a "periodic table of elements," how AI could help scientists test hypotheses before running expensive experiments, and why pairing frontier biology with frontier AI may unlock a new era of medical discovery.
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Follow Mark Zuckerberg on X: https://x.com/finkd
Follow Dr. Priscilla Chan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/priscillachan
Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz
Follow Vineeta Agarwala on X: https://x.com/vintweeta
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMark Zuckerberg· Guest0:00
This is a, a, a space that even if there's just gonna 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, you know, here in, you know, twenty twenty-five, and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology. We think that this is, like, probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build.
Priscilla Chan· Guest0:23
When we first set out that-- the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, people-- like, honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight face. [laughs] And because- They're like, "You're crazy." Yes. [laughs] 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, like, you-- there's no pathway to that being true.
Mark Zuckerberg· Guest0:45
The biology folks, I think, looked- Yeah ...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 gonna happen."
Ben Horowitz· Panelist0:55
[laughs] Yeah, yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg· Guest0:55
And then it's like, okay, there's something in between there that needs to be bridged.
Erik Torenberg· Host0:58
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's 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, data sets, and AI