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

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Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg join a16z’s Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Vineeta Agarwala to share how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is building the computational tools that will accelerate the cure, prevention, and management of all disease by century's end. They explain why basic science needs $100 million-scale projects that traditional NIH grants can't fund, how their Cell Atlas became biology's missing periodic table with millions of cells catalogued in open-source format, and why their new virtual cell models will let scientists test high-risk hypotheses in silico before investing in expensive wet lab work. Plus: the organizational shift unifying the Biohub under AI leadership, what happens when biologists and engineers sit side-by-side, and why modern biology labs are expanding compute instead of square footage.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a space that, I mean, that there's just going to be a huge amount of leverage with AI.
0:04.0	It still seems like there could be a lot more effort in this space around building tools.
0:09.0	And it's kind of this crazy thing that we're, you know, here in, you know,
0:14.0	2025 and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology.
0:18.0	We think that this is like probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build.
0:23.6	When we first set out that the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century,
0:27.6	like, honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight face.
0:31.6	They're like, you're crazy.
0:33.6	Yes.
0:34.6	And it was true because if you just decided to spend the money funding the next
0:39.3	best grant for every single lab in the country, like there was no pathway to that being true.
0:45.6	The biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy, ambitious. And then the AI folks
0:50.5	are like, well, that's kind of boring. That's just automatically going to happen.
0:55.7	I know.
0:56.0	It's like, okay, there's something in between there that needs to be bridged.
0:59.7	The scientific community needs fundamentally new tools to cure disease, not just more funding.
1:05.3	For decades, biological research has been constrained by the same limitations.
1:09.7	Small grants that fund incremental progress,
1:12.4	isolated labs working on narrow questions, and a lack of shared infrastructure to tackle the biggest
1:17.4	challenges in medicine. But what if we could change that? Today, you'll hear from Priscilla
1:22.2	Chan and Mark Zuckerberg on their 10-year journey building the infrastructure for modern biological
1:26.7	research. We discuss how they accidentally created the infrastructure for modern biological research.
	...

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