The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is "growing like a start-up, not a charity", and will soon have 200 employees:
The couple pledged to donate $1 billion a year toward it, and last year created a new investment vehicle, Chan Zuckerberg Science, that will put $3 billion toward the lofty goal "to help cure, manage or prevent all disease by the year 2100."
That's not the only big problem Chan Zuckerberg has taken on. In an 'Ask Me Anything' session on the discussion website Reddit this week, a group of Chan Zuckerberg scientists said they're working on the Human Cell Atlas project. That's a global effort to map all 30 trillion cells in the human body, similar to how the human genome project identified genes.
Its ambitions and deep pockets aren't the only things that make the Chan Zuckerberg organization unique. It's also organized as an LLC, not a nonprofit foundation. While that eliminates any tax benefits for Zuckerberg — one of the world's wealthiest people — it also gives the initiative more flexibility on how to spend it, as he explained in this post. Zuckerberg has pledged to plow any profits from investments back into the initiative to advance its mission.
Who will manage this money? A new chief financial officer hired from PayPal:
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have hired a chief financial officer for The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic fund they created in 2015 to give away the vast majority of their fortune. The role has been filled by Peggy Abkemeier Alford, a PayPal veteran who was most recently the company's senior VP of human resources. Zuckerberg announced the news on his Facebook page Friday. Alford will be responsible for managing the books of the fund that Zuckerberg is backing by selling up $1 billion of his Facebook shares per year. He and Priscilla Chan have already made investments in education reform, affordable housing, and a science program dedicated to curing the world's diseases.
You may also be interested in Mark Zuckerberg's plans to take two months of paternity leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @02:12PM (3 children)
We still aren't clear on how many cells of different types are present in the body, preliminary work on this was only done in 2013:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164 [nih.gov]
I think they are getting ahead of themselves with the expression profiles, etc. Just getting order of magnitude estimates for number of cells in different organs and the relationship to basic physiological parameters like age, sex, weight, height, etc would be a huge advance. Eventually we also want division rates, which could possibly be estimated from the number of cells at different ages. Just some upper/lower bounds within a factor of 10 would be great.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @02:40PM (2 children)
...but but... look at his previous success. He created Facebook... Facebook, man! Think about that! We're all booking faces these days! He was successful there so he is bound to be successful here too. That's how success works: you are successful in one thing so you are obviously the best thing since sliced bread (i.e. 1928 [wikipedia.org]) and are therefor bound to be successful in anything you do.
Oh, you mean I have to start with a <sarc> tag?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @02:45PM (1 child)
The main problem with that is he probably does not realize just how bad the current state of affairs in biomed research really is. He needs to rely upon "expert opinion", where the experts are the ones who have been misunderstanding p-values, not publishing "negative results", failing to collect basic data like the number of cells, etc.
What is actually needed is some really basic stuff that undergrads could probably do with sufficient funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @03:47PM
You think an HR veteran has a chance of understanding p-values (bogus or otherwise)?
This is a way to hire all his friends, and all their friends. Nepotism on a scale hitherto unheard of. Compare to the court at Versailles...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Monday August 21 2017, @07:03PM (1 child)
What about Sabo, my very talented street artist who did the beautiful F🖕CK ZUCK 2020 posters? Which my campaign did not pay for, but which I love. Facebook shut down his page, they call it unpublished. https://pic.twitter.com/IuogCdZyLP [twitter.com] Sad! #TRUMP2020 🇺🇸
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:14PM
Luffy's brother?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @08:17PM
They were looking for a fore-most export in money-laundering.