Really, Zuckerberg, curing all diseases? Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, announced last Wednesday that they aim to “cure all disease in our children’s lifetime” — or at least be able to diagnose and manage them so that they are no longer harmful. To that end, the couple has pledged USD 3 bn to be spent over a decade through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to tackle in its initial phase four kinds of diseases: heart disease , cancer , infectious disease and neurological disease like stroke. The money will go into basic scientific research, roping together some of the brightest minds in health today, in addition to ramping up efforts to promote increased funding for health.

It is hard to imagine a more noble cause, and to call it ambitious would be a major understatement. But many in the scientific community are not biting, with some seeing this as misleadingly simple and just another Silicon Valley soundbite, according to Vice: Motherboard. For one, the money is not nearly enough. The US National Institutes of Health spends USD 32 bn a year on health research and hasn’t managed to stamp out all disease, nor would it claim to, says Jim Woodgett, director of research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. The scope of the endeavor is also simply too large. Cancer comes in such wide varieties and effects unique individuals in so many different ways. Diseases also evolve and do not wait for a cure. New challenges, in the form of drug resistant bacteria and the Zika epidemic make this declaration even more ethereal than practical. Then there is the human factor itself. Efforts to eradicate polio have been met with armed resistance in some areas, and you can’t get everybody to stop smoking and eat healthy assuming their environment offers them a choice. While it is in bad form to criticize such an endeavor, it is always important to put challenges in perspective.