Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced that they had a daughter named Max on Tuesday.
In a letter to his daughter, Zuckerberg also announced that he'll give away 99% of his Facebook shares — a cool $45 billion — during his lifetime. It'll be channeled into the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a new humanitarian organization.
In the letter, which also functions as something of a manifesto for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg essentially says that he's bent on ending disease.
"Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we've already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others," he writes. "As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years."
He notes that most people die from just five different conditions: cancer, stroke, heart disease, and neurodegenerative and infectious diseases.
So, according to Zuckerberg's logic, these diseases should be taken on. He believes that if there's a chance that Max's generation and her children have a shot at living in a world free of disease, then he has an obligation to make that disease-free world a reality.
"Once we recognize that your generation and your children's generation may not have to suffer from disease, we collectively have a responsibility to tilt our investments a bit more towards the future to make this reality. Your mother and I want to do our part," he writes in the letter.
"Over short periods of five or ten years, it may not seem like we're making much of a difference," he continues. "But over the long term, seeds planted now will grow, and one day, you or your children will see what we can only imagine: a world without suffering from disease."
That's a futurist prediction Ray Kurzweil would be proud of.
