The Chan – Zuckerberg Foundation distributed the first grants

Julia Korowski, XX2 century

The Biohub project, created by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, as part of the Chan–Zuckerberg Initiative, distributed the first grants. Representatives of the charity foundation selected 47 researchers who will receive about $1.5 million for scientific research over five years. In total, Biohab will spend more than 50 million on grants.

Biohab is a research center that unites employees of Stanford and two campuses of the University of California – Berkeley and San Francisco. "We said, 'Show us your riskiest ideas,'" says Stephen Quake, one of the leaders of the Biohab and a bioengineer at Stanford University. About 750 people responded to the call – they presented projects dedicated to fundamental biological processes and the fight against infectious diseases. Quake says that representatives of the Biohab preferred scientists who had already established themselves. We selected those who have more than enough bold ideas, but there are no preliminary results yet. "There is creative anarchy here in Silicon Valley, and that's what we want to take advantage of," explains Quake.

Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist from Stanford, and part-time chief scientific consultant at Pinterest, received a grant even though his main work is related to the analysis of social networks, and not with the study of biological systems. Leskovets showed that his methods of working with data will be useful in studying the complex interaction of genes and proteins. "I don't think I would have received funding for biological research from traditional sources, because the grant-givers would have been skeptical of my work. They would say, 'Oh, no, he's not like us,'" says the scientist. The other winners of the contest share his feelings. Representatives of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the main center of the US government responsible for research on health and biomedicine problems – they want to see preliminary results, explains Quake. "We are funding scientists so that they will later have the opportunity to receive an NIH grant," he explains.

Critics claim that NIH and The World Health Organization would have disposed of this money much better, but Quake replies that Biohab is not trying to replace these agencies, but to help them. "We take on something that exceeds their risk threshold," he says. Neither the Biohab nor the Chan–Zuckerberg Initiative will be able to replace budget funding even with a strong desire. The three billion dollars that the foundation is going to spend on scientific research on the treatment and prevention of diseases pales in comparison with 30 billion – about the amount NIH spends annually on medical research.

Scientists will meet at the Biohab office in San Francisco several times a year. If necessary, they will be able to use the laboratories located there – it is assumed that joint work will help speed up the progress of research. Some grantees are already looking forward to the meetings. Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiology specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, studies archaea and bacteria. In the mid-2000s, she was among the researchers who drew the attention of the scientific community to the repetitive DNA sequences called CRISPR. Banfield and her colleagues found them in the genome of bacteria collected in an abandoned iron mine. Now, thanks to many other scientists, CRISPR/Cas9 has become the most popular gene editing technology. "I'm doing basic research, but to take the next step, new techniques and techniques are needed that I can't work on alone," says Banfield.

Researchers receiving Biohab grants are required to publish drafts of scientific papers in arXiv and other open repositories. It is not yet known whether the Chan–Zuckerberg Initiative will adopt the "open data policy", which is professed by another major charitable foundation – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps the authors will have to work only with those scientific journals that publish articles for free – in this case, all expenses will be paid by Biohab. But it is already known that scientists will be able to apply for patents: the developments will be jointly owned by the Biohab and the organizations in which the researchers are registered.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  13.02.2017