YouSaid · the spoken record

Priscilla Chan

lines on the record: 62
first: 2026-07-09
most recent: 2026-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is produced specific data sets for the purpose of training AI models to build virtual cells that can do specific things. So I think that that's like a pretty interesting zone to be in. And of all the things that we've worked on, 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 returns. We've just double down on it over and over and over until now we're at the point that we're 10 years in and BioHub is really the main focus of our philanthropy at this point. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of, that's.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like simultaneously. I mean, yeah, well, probably like the internet earlier, but we kind of think about ourselves and the work that we're doing at the biohub as frontier biology paired with frontier AI. So there are labs that do frontier AI that basically are building the most advanced models. And then there are Lots of biological research organizations that effectively do very leading edge research to build, to either discover new data sets or are looking to certain challenges. But so far, there hasn't been anyone who's tried to do both of those at once. And when you look at, I mean, even something like Alphafold, which is amazing, right? It was built off of this data set that was a public data set that had been produced decades ago, right? And what I think you have the opportunity to do if you do both”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's also this funny thing where the biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious. And then the AI folks are like, well, that's kind of boring. That's just automatically going to happen. That's okay. There's something in between there that needs to be bridged. And if you can kind of use the kind of modern AI tools in order to build the types of tools that biologists need. So that's a big part of how we think about our work is.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And it was true because if you just decided to spend the money funding the next best grant for every single lab in the country, there's no pathway to that being true. But if you forced people to really think about this and like, okay, what is the most credible pathway to doing this? And what are the barriers to that credible pathway? Then we sort of got somewhere, right? They were like, well, like, there's no shared tools or we're not working on big projects and building the right data sets. And we're like, okay, well, then we can start doing something about that. And so that's where the idea of building shared tools, because no one right now in the science.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're super focused on like actually making every scientist better and beyond science, like startups, startup founders, because the The point is we can't do this alone. And when we first set up the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, people like, honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight face.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And it seems like there's also something that is you don't really get credit for the tools in a lot of ways. I mean, we have companies that use your tools and they're very happy about it, but I didn't even know that that was the case.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So our whole approach on this is basically Let's help build tools that will accelerate the pace of the whole field. And I think that there's a niche that I think fits that because if you look at how funding works in science, the vast majority of funding comes from the government and NIH grants. It's parceled out into these relatively small grants that allow individual investigators to investigate usually pretty near-term things. And the development of these kind of new types of tools, whether it's imaging or building now a lot of AI things like virtual cell models, are longer term, oftentimes more expensive to develop. So think about like on the order of maybe 100 million to a billion dollars over a 10 to 15 year period. And then you try to unlock those tools and give them to the scientific community to accelerate the pace. So that's kind of the theory.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accelerating the pace of basic science. And the theory that we had was if you look at the history of science, most major breakthroughs are basically preceded by the invention of a new tool to observe phenomena in a new way. So I think about things like the microscope, being able to observe bacteria or other fields, the telescope. Just to use an engineering example, without those kind of tools, it's kind of like your coding without being able to step through the code and debug things, right?”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It always surprises people when I talk about how we work in basic science research. I trained as a pediatrician and people always think, oh, it must be about medicine. And for me, I went into medicine because I wanted to improve people's lives. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be able to help others. And I think training as a pediatrician at UCSF, I met a lot of patients and frankly like little kids and families for which we just had no idea what the problem was. And they might have a specific gene that they could name if they were lucky or they could be grouped into a bunch of other diseases and there'd be a general sort of PDF they'd print out like this is what we know and then it was my job as an intern or resident to try to translate like a few lines of information to how we were supposed to take care of the patient. And for me, that's when I really realized the power of basic science and how”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biology folks, I think, looked at it as if it were crazy ambitious, and then the AI folks are like, well, that's kind of boring. That's just automatically going to happen. I mean, it's like, okay, there's something in between there that needs to be bridged.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we first set out the goal to cure and prevent disease by the end of the century, people like honestly, most scientists couldn't look at us with a straight Yes, and it was true because if you just decided to spend the money funding the next best grant for every single lab in the country, there was no pathway to that being true.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a space that, I don't know if there's just going to be a huge amount of leverage with AI, 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 2025 and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology. We think that this is probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source