Item — HN Reader

> there are a lot of overly ambitious efforts like, even though this seems the most ambitious of them all

Chan Zuckerberg is NOTORIOUS for overly ambitious claims, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative started in 2015 with the bold statement they would "cure all disease in our lifetime." It's been 11 years. Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.

When Zuckerberg realized he probably wasn't going to hit this goal they quietly changed it to "within our children's lifetimes."

I used to work in their building and actually saw them change it on the wall and as "within our childrens" 3 years in. Stay posted, probably in 15 years they buy themselves some more time and make it "our children's children's lifetimes."

2 comments

>Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.

I mean, curing all disease isn't something where progress is linear. A large portion of the work is done upfront before you see any result. Then when your knowledge base and methodology is sufficiently robust, many disease can then be cured in quick succession. The fact that they have no visible success after 10 years says little about the viability of their goal.

Not sure if that’s true.

Looking at the history of modern medicine, the cure rate of diseases was not exponential, it was gradual over the course of hundreds of years.

Sure there were a few big jumps- water sanitation and antibiotics come to mind- but if you look at cured cardiovascular diseases, cancers, GI diseases etc., they all started with bad treatments that indeed slowly improved over decades.

If CZI is looking to eliminate all disease in a lifetime (say 100 years) I would expect some progress.

You're talking about curing diseases where each disease is a largely independent effort, which is distinct from an enterprise aimed at curing all disease. The former will be much more linear in appearance than the latter.

I honestly don't think it matters, so long as they're working toward the same guiding direction they'll achieve the same thing regardless of the arbitrary point in the future they pick to aim toward.

It is nice to know when confronted with new information that they might revise their stance too.