Zuckerberg: Biohub is now the main focus of CZI philanthropy
Mark Zuckerberg · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease · Nov 6, 2025 · at 8:06
Mark Zuckerberg describes how ten years into the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), science research via Biohub became the primary focus due to its high impact relative to other programs.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Actually when we started CZI, we kind of actually focused on a number of areas. And what we found is just that The science research has had by far the biggest return, so we've just doubled down on it over and over and over, until now we're at the point that, you know, we're 10 years in, and Biohub is really the, like, main focus of our philanthropy at this point.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: AI will help cure all diseases significantly before 2100
“When we started the mission to see if we could help the scientific community cure and prevent diseases by the end of the century. I do think with the advances in AI, that should be possible to do significantly sooner.”
Zuckerberg: CZI is the first to combine frontier AI and biology
“There are labs that do frontier AI that basically, you know, are building the most advanced models. And then there are, Lots of biological research organizations that, that effectively do very leading edge research to build you know, to either discover new dat…”
Zuckerberg: Meta protein researchers led by Alex Rives join CZI
“We actually had a bunch of researchers who'd formerly worked at Meta on protein folding models is joining a biohub and Alex Reeves, the leader of it is actually going to be the kind of head of the whole science program”
Zuckerberg: CZI will combine biohub models into a general virtual cell
“So we'll, we'll, we'll build the biohubs around grand biological challenges. The biohubs will build tools that will generate novel data sets. We will build models based on those and then eventually combine the models into an increasingly general view of a virt…”
Zuckerberg: Virtual cell modeling requires a hierarchical protein-to-cell strategy
“Part of the hypothesis is that you can look at all these different cells and you can kind of simulate how they might behave, but you're gonna have a somewhat shallow understanding unless you actually have this hierarchical understanding of what how the subcomp…”
Zuckerberg: Biology still lacks a periodic table equivalent in 2025
“It still seems like there could be a lot more effort in this space around building tools, and it's kind of this crazy thing that we're, you know, here in, you know, twenty-twenty-five, and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biolo…”