To cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century is an audacious mission. When Mark and I set this goal for our science work eight years ago, we wanted to push the limits of what we thought was possible, and we didn’t want our own ambitions to be the cap on what we could achieve.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to do something I never thought I would do: speak at an AI conference. And yet, I found myself sitting on stage at NVIDIA GTC, sharing the progress that we have made to build tools and fund efforts to generate rich biological datasets that are primed for the acceleration we’re seeing today in AI technology. Combining these datasets with the power of large language models is the next step in reaching our goal of helping scientists unlock new treatments and cures.
The story of how we got here — a philanthropy with a moonshot mission and me speaking at a cutting-edge AI conference — has an unlikely origin: my grandparents.
My grandparents on both sides of my family were living in Vietnam during the war in the ‘70s. Because of the war, the only way to flee the violence was to get on small fishing boats and float into the South China Sea to look for a safe harbor. These boats weren’t sturdy, and my grandparents had heard terrible stories of boats sinking and taking the lives of entire families with them. Still, they believed a better future was out there and were willing to take the risk.
So, my grandparents paired up their young children — one from each family — and sent them out on the boats by themselves. The oldest kids left first. My grandparents left last. And it took almost 10 years, but eventually, everyone was safely reunited.
My grandparents had enough hope and optimism to take that risk. I believe it’s in my epigenetics — coded in my DNA — to take big bets, too. CZI’s work to help scientists cure disease is our way of doing that. And we think AI is pivotal to how we get there.
That’s why our next big bet is to build AI-powered virtual cells. Utilizing one of the largest high-performance AI computing systems for nonprofit life science research, we hope to help scientists explore the molecular underpinnings of human health and disease.
