Dear friend,
As we look to 2024, we believe there is an exciting opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate progress on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
In the early days of CZI, we didn’t know the exact path we wanted to take, but we knew where to start. We listened to our partners on the ground and learned about the challenges they face. Second, CZI is uniquely positioned as a constructively minded charity with great scientists, educators, a full-stack technology team, and mission-driven people who drive our work forward. We have considered the issues that should be addressed. These are called CZI-type problems.
In science, we have spent the past seven years exploring and refining the CZI-type problems we are going to tackle. When we began our scientific work in 2016, we set a goal to help scientists treat, prevent, and manage all diseases by the end of this century. To achieve this goal, we knew we needed to better understand cells, the fundamental units of life that are responsible for many diseases. Efforts to fill these knowledge gaps have required strengthening and increasing the field’s understanding of fundamental cell biology.
Put another way, how can we debug code if we can’t examine every line of code? We give scientists the same ability to step through the code of our bodies. I would like to. This requires new tools to observe, measure, and analyze the processes that keep us healthy and the errors that cause disease.
So we set out to help researchers gather new information about cells, the tissues and organs they form, and how they change between health and disease. We built open-source software tools that allow scientists to access, explore, and annotate that data. We also established a scientific institute to address some of the biggest challenges in cell biology and imaging. And now we are building high-performance AI computing systems to power predictive models of healthy and diseased human cells.
We believe that this convergence of data, tools, and AI will lead to new scientific understanding and discoveries about how cells behave and function. This is the next step towards our goal of helping eliminate disease as we know it.
When people first hear of this goal, they either think it is impossible or inevitable. We believe the truth lies somewhere in between. That can happen, but only if scientists build the tools and fund the science to make new discoveries that help change the way we see the world.
See how we’ve built towards this moment, aligning with two of our earliest bets in science: single-cell biology and the interdisciplinary biohub model.
