Scientist Stories: Cori Bargmann, Genes and Behaviors

I'm here representing the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It's a new philanthropic organization, and since we are new kids on the block, we're still grateful for the opportunity to present ourselves. This is an organization that was founded about a year and a half ago by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, who've decided to give away the vast majority of their wealth to promote equal opportunity and advance human potential. And the areas they have chosen have been based in part on Priscilla's training as a pediatrician, as a practicing physician, um, who sees often that she can't treat children because we don't know enough about the diseases that underlie it. So, um, the two of them together decided that they wanted to promote basic science for biomedical ends, And the stated goal of the science project is that we want to support basic science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. The end of the century is a long way away, and the way that we're interpreting this is that What we have are donors with a very long time frame who are asking us, what could we do to science to accelerate science so that in the next 80 years we could make a whole different kind of progress from what we couldn't do otherwise? Outside of the short grant cycle, outside of the next election cycle, really think about things in the long term. Oh, that wasn't meant to be so funny. And so this is what we, what we envision as ways of accelerating research very broadly. The first is that better tools and technologies make everyone a better scientist. And so to the extent that we can support those, those will have a very broad-ranging impact. The second is that collaborations are the way to move complex problems forward, that no one person can be expert in all of the different areas of medicine and experimental science. And computation and computer science that are needed for modern science to advance. And so we want to promote strong collaborations between groups. And the third is that we want to build support for science, both through funding but also through building communities, building grassroots support and political support as well. And in our mind, the Human Cell Atlas perfectly exemplifies all three of these principles. So first of all, it is We see the Human Cell Atlas as a tool with the potential to advance all of biomedicine, as Avi very passionately described it this morning. Second, it involves already a strong set of collaborations between physicians who understand about human tissues, experimentalists who develop these new single-cell methods, and the computational groups who are figuring out how to deal with this much more complex and probabilistic form of data. And third, we think that this is a community that is growing up and that is really a community that we would like to support and build. So, we've been thinking about how to build this community and how— what we will do, and our view is that we want to support science that is robust and reliable and scalable and shareable. And many of these are exactly the themes, again, that have come up in the talks this morning. The idea of sharing data, the idea of really working hard on developing robust systems for understanding things that can be supported. And second, we want to have some sort of a differentiated impact. And in thinking about what we can have as a differentiated impact, we're taking advantage of our founder's connections, Mark Zuckerberg's connections and interests, and our location in Silicon Valley to build an in-house engineering team that will work together with scientists to help to develop the engineering side and bring engineering to biology in a more robust way. So we want to fund experimental scientists and scientists in the community who will have the most creative ideas, who will have the most diverse sets of ideas, but then we can supplement that funding by helping to build different kinds of tools using state-of-the-art expertise in computer science to make these more powerful and more accessible. And so we are funding the Human Cell Atlas project. Or planning to fund it initially through a request for applications. We were really gratified by the response to that. They're under review, so I can't say anything about any individual application now, but I just want to say that we were incredibly gratified by the enthusiasm in the community, by the diversity of different locations, of different people, and the interest that they showed in what we were doing. And second, we've been actively engaged in the data coordination platform that John Marioni just told you about, which is being jointly developed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative together at this point with scientists from EBI, the Broad Institute, and Santa Cruz. And so with that, I will turn it over to Jeremy.