Why Chan and Zuckerberg cannot cure all diseases

By | 26th September 2016

It has been described as a ‘brilliantly bold’ initiative, as ‘audacious’, and a ‘game-changer’. This is the proposal by Mark Zuckerberg, principal shareholder in Facebook and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, to invest $3 billion in a programme to cure all diseases by 2100… Why discourage a well-intentioned donor by asking hard questions or pointing to the potential pitfalls…In this case, the problems reflect the growing disconnection of biomedical research not only from the social sciences but also from important areas of fundamental biology…it is naïve to imagine that any such evolutionary edge can be permanent, that we can eliminate disease and, by implication, live forever.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.