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

This is a a a space that I mean, that 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, 2025, 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. 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. And They're like, you're crazy. Yes. And it was true because if you just decide 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. The biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious. And then the AI folks are like, well, that's kinda boring. That's just automatically gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. I know. That's like, okay. There's something in between there that needs to be bridged. 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 doctor 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, datasets, and AI systems they believe researchers will need to make faster progress against disease. We explore Cell Atlas, virtual cell models, Biohub, and the idea that the future of medicine may depend as much on better tools as on better treatments. Mark Priscilla, welcome to the ASX Z podcast. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Great to be here. Excited. Alright. Excited to have you. You're doing exciting stuff. Yeah. To that end, almost a decade ago, you guys started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with the mission and intent to cure, prevent, manage all disease by the end of this century. There's a lot of missions that you guys could have poured your time and resources into. Take us behind the conversations of why you guys picked this one. Maybe Priscilla, why don't we start with you and your side of the story? It always surprises people when I talk about how we work in basic science research. I trained as a pediatrician, and people always think, oh, it must be about medicine. And for me, I went into medicine because I wanted to improve people's lives. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be able to help others. And I think training as a pediatrician at UCSF, I met a lot of patients and, frankly, like, little …