The Cure For All Disease? Mark Zuckerberg Hires Team Of Expert Scientists To End Global Illness

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is launching a new global mission: to eradicate humankind of any and all diseases, from international epidemics like HIV and AIDS, to prevalent cancers and neurodegenerative illnesses responsible for millions of deaths annually.

He and his wife, Chan Zuckerberg, launched a billion-dollar philanthropy organization in 2015 in an effort to "cure, prevent or manage all disease" by 2100. And now Zuckerberg has hired the initiative's first group of 47 scientists to begin researching and developing long-term strategies and cures to global illness. The announcement includes $50 million in newly allocated funding for Biohub, the couple's separate medical research component, to be spent over the next five years.

Dozens of newly hired scientists will be put at the forefront of groundbreaking technological research for a variety of diseases, including malaria, for which Biohub is reportedly developing biochips to track the transmission of the virus.

"We are conducting research that helps solve big health problems," the Biohub's site states. "We find and support the best and brightest biologists, scientists, engineers and technologists. Our culture emphasizes intellectual freedom and collaboration. We provide our team with the best scientific tools - and when the right tools don't exist, we will invent them."

The digital entrepreneur's goal may seem like an unrealistic feat, even for two billionaires like Zuckerberg and Chan. But then again, garnering a population of 1.86 billion monthly active users on a single social media site was likely considered unrealistic at some point, too.

Biohub works with three renowned academic research institutions to produce scientific studies, includingthe University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco.

"Our investigators come from these outstanding research institutions, and their faculty will be an integral part of our day-to-day operations here at Biohub," Joseph DeRisi, co-president of Biohub, told BuzzFeed News. "Both Mark and Priscilla are avid consumers of science, they enjoy learning new things and knowing what the cutting edge of research is all about."