Facebook’s Zuckerberg Donates $3 billion to Medical Science: Some Major Implications

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in September, 2016, that they would invest more than $3 billion during the next decade to build tools that can facilitate medical research on diseases. The first outlay of funds ($600 million) would create a research lab of engineers and scientists from the area’s major research universities.[1] “This focus on building on tools suggests a road map for how we might go about curing, preventing and managing all diseases this century,” Zuckerberg said at the announcement.[2] Moreover, the couple had previously announced a year before that they would give away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes through the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative in the areas of education and healthcare. I would like to point out a few implications that may not be readily apparent.

Firstly, such funds going to preventing and curing disease could bring the day nearer when—along with advances in anti-aging and stem-cell research—death is no longer inevitable for a human being. Even before the Zuckerberg-Chan announcements, some scientists were openly predicting that that day might come as early as the 2050s. To be sure, being able to grow replacement organs, apply an anti-aging treatment to the body’s cells, and prevent major diseases (I suspect the common cold will still be around, just to keep us humble) does not guarantee that death will be put off; running into a train or bus, or jumping off a high building could still mean death. Nevertheless, the notion that death can be put off indefinitely dwarfs the combined impact from all the twentieth-century’s technological progress put together.

Considering the costs involved, access to rendering death no longer inevitable would doubtlessly raise ethical issues in terms of the distribution. Moreover, ethical questions would suddenly arise concerning the species’ increasing population and reproduction-rights. Secondary issues such as climate change could become even more pressing. It could be, for example, that a drastically increasing human population outstrips the planet’s food-capacity as well as the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb the species’ waste, including greenhouse gases. It would be highly ironic were the feat in removing the threat of death a major contributor to the extinction of the species. In short, the story could go as follows: we maximize our species’ size—which means success genetically—only for the increased numbers to cause extinction because the climate is no longer hospitable to human habitation or the lack of food causes wars ending in nuclear war. The first alternative would be particularly likely.

Secondly, that the couple could give up 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes may imply that they will have earned too much money, if being able to use it is at all relevant. Put another way, being able to give away almost all of their total earnings may suggest that they (namely Zuckerberg) earned too much. Does it even make sense for someone to get money that is beyond the capacity to be spent even through inheritance?

One implication is the question of whether Zuckerberg’s employees at Facebook should get a significant amount of what Zuckerberg earns, whether in salary or stock. Why such a huge difference in compensation? To be sure, ownership does have its privileges, but is there no limit? The fact that Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet could give vast sums of money to charity raises the question of whether founders and CEOs shouldn’t face some limit in terms of wealth, with a progressive tax system kicking in for multi-billionaires. Were elected representatives to decide how such vast sums should be spent, the legitimacy of the power behind such a decision would be greater.

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1. Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Fund to Invest #3 Billion,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016.

2. Ibid.

Humans As the Intense Predator: Unbalancing the Food-Chain Unsustainably

By 2015, humans—the homo sapiens species in particular—had become “the dominant predator across many systems”; that is to say, the species had become an unsustainable "super predator."[1] We have had a huge impact on food webs and ecosystems around the globe.[2] Moreover, we have been using more of the planet's resources than we should. By August 2015, for example, humans had already consumed the year's worth of the world's resources.[3] In terms of fossil fuels, the consumption has had an impact on the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Behind human consumption are human beings, so the astonishing increase in human population is a major factor. As a virus-like species incredibly successful genetically over the previous five-hundred years, the self-maximizing feature both in terms of population ecology and profit-maximization may be the seed of the species destruction, and thus long-term genetic failure.

According to one study, humans are "particularly intense" when it comes to hunting, and have used powerful killing technology (trawl nets, guns and mechanized slaughterhouses, for example) to dominate other predators. [4] 

Large-scale fishing does not distinguish between fertile adults, weak fish, and the young. (James Watt: Getty Images)

With the efficiency (i.e., profitability) of large-scale fishing businesses, we remove fish at 14 times the rate of marine predators.[5] The research confirms what many scientists had warned for years: If we don't stop overfishing, we may soon run out of animals to catch. The study reports that many fish populations had already been hunted to the brink of collapse, shark populations decimated, and less than 8 percent of southern bluefin tuna left. [6] On land, humans had been killing top carnivores, such as bears, wolves and lions, at nine times their own self-predation rate.[7] By 2015, the food chain as a whole had become terribly unbalanced that thus unsustainable as a whole.

Applying business-efficiency principles to hunting, we can capture adult prey at minimal cost, and so gain maximum, short-term reward. The cost being minimized is both in terms of business and the species. Of the latter, Chris Darimont of the study points out that "advanced killing technology mostly excuses humans from the formerly dangerous act of predation." [8] Because hunters “’capture’ mammals with bullets, and fishes with hooks and nets. . . [Humans] assume minimal risk compared with non-human predators, especially terrestrial carnivores, which are often injured while living what amounts to a dangerous lifestyle."[9] To be sure, working on the deck of a commercial fishing boat in the north Pacific is one of the most hazardous jobs around, but the fishing businesses can externalize at least some of the cost (e.g., insurance).

Even so, by not applying principles from population ecology, the businesses engaged in hunting, fishing, and farming animals have been undermining efficiency, and thus profitability. The study claims that besides the sheer number of animals that humans kill for food being problematic—56 billion farmed animals were at the time being slaughtered annually, “(h)umans focus on adult prey, unlike other predators. A full-grown lion, for example, often opts for the smaller, weaker juvenile zebra rather than an adult. This distinction makes it harder for animal populations to recover as breeding members are removed.”[10] Presumably recovering populations are in line with sustainable profitability.

Tom Reimchen, a co-author on the study, “uses a financial analogy to explain the damaging consequences of hitting adult populations hardest. He calls the adults the system's ‘reproductive capital’—the equivalent of the capital held in a bank account or a pension fund. And he says we are eating into this capital when we should really be living off the interest—the juveniles, which many species will produce in colossal numbers, expecting a good fraction to be doomed from the moment they are born via predation, starvation, disease, accidents and more.”[11] “We are dialing back the reproductive capacity of populations," Darimont said. [12]

The doubtlessly unintentional self-defeating strategies of the businesses mirrors that of the species itself, in that the failure to be prudent in terms of population growth is also self-defeating because the ecosystems, including the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, get breached beyond repair in terms of being able to sustain our species when it is essentially a maximizing variable rather than tending toward an equilibrium. In short, the wise human species—homo sapiens—is not so wise, after all.

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1 Chris Darimont et al, “The Unique Ecology of Human Predators,” Science, Vol. 349, no. 6250, pp. 858-860.

2 Ibid.

3 Jonathan Amos, “Humans Are ‘Unique Super-Predator’,” BBC News, August 20, 2005.

4 Nick Visser, “Thanks Humanity. Now We’re Unsustainable ‘Super Preditors,” The Huffington Post, August 21, 2015.

5 Amos, “Unique Super-Preditor.”

6 Visser, “Thanks Humanity.”

7 Amos, “Unique Super-Preditor.”

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Visser, “Thanks Humanity.”

11 Amos, “Unique Super-Preditor.”

12 Visser, “Thanks Humanity.”