“Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerberg
No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups
Jun 10, 2026
Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Alex Reeves are pivoting their philanthropic efforts toward a 'virtual biology' initiative that integrates frontier AI with wet-lab research. By building hierarchical models of cells and proteins, they aim to move science from discovery-based to engineering-based, providing open-source tools to accelerate the global effort to cure, prevent, and manage all diseases.
Key insight: The team successfully folded over 1.1 billion proteins using a general-purpose language model, discovering that the ability to design new proteins and antibodies emerged as a property of the model simply learning to 'understand' protein language, rather than being explicitly programmed for those tasks.
