Meet the Rock Star Scientist Who's Spending Facebook's CEO and Wife's $3 Billion
September 26, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a physician, last year created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which pledged $3 billion toward basic science research over the next 10 years. Last week the Initiative announced that it was pledging $600 million in support of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. What was slightly overlooked in all the spotlights, was the woman who will head the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York.
Bargmann, born in 1961, has a PhD in cancer biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Her research efforts have focused on Caenorhabditis elegans, which is a very small roundworm. What makes her research interesting, and perhaps is suggestive of the Institute’s overall interest in basic research, is that the roundworm has only 302 neurons. Bargmann had spent years studying how its genes interact with the environment and experiences. This has had broad influence on our understanding of how human behavior is affected by stress, hunger, fear, and other experiences.
Yet that alone wouldn’t automatically identify her to lead a $3 billion health research endeavor. She does, however, also co-chairs the National Institute of Health group that developed the strategy for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiatives.
Chan and Zuckerberg spent several years talking to scientists and others about what they hoped to achieve with the Initiative, and they kept pointing toward Bargmann. In a recent interview with Science, Bargmann said, “Shirley Tilghman, the former president of Princeton [University], who suggested to them maybe it would be a good idea to have a neuroscientist because it’s a forward looking area of medicine where there are a lot of unmet needs. So their thinking was pretty advanced by the time I started talking to them [late last fall], they had already formulated what kinds of things they wanted to do, and I just resonated with that instantly.”
The Initiative’s broader goal is curing or managing all diseases by 2100. It’s certainly ambitious, although “manage” is general enough to allow a broad range of definitions, although “cure” seems specific enough.
When asked if the goal was possible, Bargmann said, “First of all, do you know how much medicine has advanced in the past 80 years? Even in our lifetime in terms of heart disease and cancer and AIDS. Why should that stop now?”
She fully expects, now that so much basic work has been created and tools developed, that it will only accelerate. She also admits that the long timeframe is a real benefit. “That was something that Mark and Priscilla had been thinking about even before they talked to me. And that was what made me think they were on the right track. Because there are a lot of problems you can’t do in two years or five years. There are a lot of problems that will take decades. But if you know they’re important, you keep working on them.”
One of the first projects proposed for the initiative and its new Biohub is the creation of a cell atlas. Bargmann told CNN, “The Chan Zuckerberg science plan is to focus on developing the technologies for making a cell atlas. We want to identify every cell type in the human body, their location, their numbers, their neighbors and their molecular components.”
Very similarly to the Human Genome Project, it’s not an impossible task, just no one has decided to throw a lot of time, energy and funding towards accomplishing. But its usefulness as a life sciences tool seems fairly obvious.
Despite the new job, Bargmann intends to keep her laboratory at Rockefeller. But, she told Science, “My priority right now is to build this organization and try and make it the best thing possible. How this is all going to work out with the lab and the organization and the locations in the long term is to be determined. But I’m going to be spending an enormous amount of time out here in the Bay Area with Mark and Priscilla and the people at the Biohub getting the organization going.”