It's Monday, May 20th, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andrea Viscontas.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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This week's interview concerns a topic that is very dear to my heart. Not too long ago, I have had a friend face a terrible diagnosis, ALS. Those are words that you never want to hear from your neurologist. And I spent part of my scientific career working at the memory and aging center at UCSF, where I did a postdoc. I saw firsthand how

devastating neurodegenerative diseases are. Now, I did that postdoc more than 10 years ago. And even at

that time, we really felt very hopeful that a cure for many of these diseases was just around the

corner. After all, we had spent a long time studying the mechanisms of these diseases,

and we felt like we had a pretty good handle of what was going on. So it was just a matter of getting

the right treatments into the pipeline and out to the patients. But since then, trial after trial

after trial has failed. So some people are arguing that it's time for a new perspective.

Enter the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Now, one of the other common topics of conversation in the Bay Area where I live these days

is that coming minting of many millionaires over the next year, as several tech companies have gone public.

Well, in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative was launched to commemorate

the birth of the daughter of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

They promised to invest up to a billion dollars in Facebook shares in each of the next three years.

By some accounts, they have pledged that 99% of their Facebook

wealth valued at $45 billion will eventually be part of this initiative. That's a lot of money.

And the question is, with that kind of money, can they solve the kinds of problems that have

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