Social media depend on an engaged society - now they might just make us healthier in return!

As far apart as the technological worlds of social media and drug discovery may well seem to be, there is a new trend that marries the vast wealth obtained by pioneers in the former to funding the forefront of the latter. When we consider the dizzying digital world that we now live in, trying to remember what life was like before email, social media and smartphones, well, somehow all roads tend to be lead back to that single word and entity - Facebook. 

Things have changed, of course, and today Facebook's biggest challenge has less to do with connecting people both locally and globally, but given that they are a publicly traded company, they have to make enough money to keep the boardroom and shareholders happy. In that vein, Facebook is as much an advertising and marketing tool today for many companies, rather than simply a social media outlet. Monetizing Facebook, particularly on mobile, has been one of Mark Zuckerberg's greatest challenges, and by all accounts he is doing rather well at it; even if their monetization strategy has not always been clear. 

Irrespective of how Facebook founders intend to continue to make money, the clearest thing about them is that they are already incredibly wealthy and are generously spreading some of that wealth into the healthcare arena. Peter Thiel, the legendary investor who discovered Facebook, has put cash into some 25 biotech start-ups to date. Sean Parker (famously played by Justin Timberlake in the movie) made a donation of some $24M a while back, to found the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research at Stanford University, which is one of the biggest private donations for allergy research ever in the USA. 

Further, just this summer, it was announced that Parker would be funding the first ever clinical trial of the controversial gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, as part and parcel of his Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy - an initiative that involves six leading cancer centres - spanning some 40 laboratories and more than 300 researchers all focused on immunotherapy. He will shell out an extremely cool $250M on that one!

Given such contributions, and the humanitarian efforts of other technology pioneers and social leaders such as Bill Gates, well, it was inevitable that it would draw other big dogs to the table. Ergo, and to wit, the announcement this past week that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Dr. Priscilla Chan, were donating a massive $3B to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime."

That is an ambition as equally massive as their donation! That amount, coming from a private couple, is probably one of the biggest medical research donations ever, anywhere, and if any kind of "sibling" rivalry between Parker and Zuckerberg helped fuel that monster donation, well, researchers and clinicians are not going to complain about it! $600M of that money will be doled out over the next decade under the auspices of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which intends to invoke a multidisciplinary approach in addressing human disease. 

You know, as scientists we tend to snigger at over-hyped announcements by tech execs claiming they will "eradicate" or "cure" this disease or that disease or even all disease, as if money was the only object in the way.  It is a major obstacle, yes, but if that was the only thing in the way, then we would have cured HIV and cancer already, right? Entities like Microsoft and Facebook tend to face some backlash for over-hyped claims of how they will set medical research on the right track, as if having a PhD or MD and a decade's laboratory experience has little to do with it. 

But in this case it is worth pointing out that Zuckerberg is talking "patience" and the idea is to achieve the Initiative's goals over the next century (yes, 100 years!) and they are not claiming that they will cure cancer in a mere handful of years. The media laps up major donations from big Silicon Valley names such as the Chan-Zuckerbergs, and it is often they, not the donors, who inflate the story into a de facto mission impossible. Doomed from the start, by all the hype. 

Having said that, they have chosen a bigtime neuroscientist as the President of the new venture, none other than Cori Bargmann, who is currently a professor at Rockefeller studying C. elegans neurobiology. This coupled with oversight from a stellar scientific advisory board should pave the way to some big science, which according to Bargmann, will incorporate academia, biotech and engineering. 

Social media have been very pervasive in our lives, it's almost impossible not to have been touched by them in some way today, and another most pervasive aspect of daily life is human disease; so in many ways the application of the successes of one technological advance that depends on society's involvement towards the ongoing health of that society somehow seems entirely appropriate.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is an extremely admirable one, and you can be sure that I will be watching and commenting on it as things roll out and develop, and hopefully one day we will be discussing the solving of a major health problem for mankind. I just hope that it's not in the latter part of that 100 years, because by then this blog (and I) will he dead and buried - and probably the Chan-Zuckerbergs as well! ;)