Tech titans’ latest project : Defy death | The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-titans-latest-project-defy-death
Pour les milliardaires de la Silicon Valley la voie pour devenir (littéralement) immortels passe par un mariage avec une scientifique,
Several of the #Silicon_Valley billionaires married women with backgrounds in science or medicine, and those wives direct the philanthropy.
[Brin’s wife, Anne] Wojcicki, who studied biology and previously worked as a health-care consultant, is co-head of the couple’s foundation. Priscilla Chan, a pediatric resident at the University of California at San Francisco, with her husband, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, 30, donated $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital, where 70 percent of the patients are underinsured or uninsured. The two couples also teamed up with others to create the Breakthrough Prizes for scientists who make discoveries that extend human life. Its $3 million payouts — given to six scientists each year — dwarf similar awards, including the Nobel Prizes, currently about $925,000.
Pam Omidyar, a biologist and former research assistant in an immunology lab, co-founded the Omidyar Network with her husband, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, who became a billionaire at 31. They have donated millions to research about resiliency — the traits that help people bounce back from illness or other adversity.
And Page, who is now 41 and chief executive of Google, has made the biggest bet on longevity yet, founding Calico, short for California Life Company, a secretive anti-aging research center, with an investment of up to $750 million from Google.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who teaches a class on strategic giving at Stanford University and is the wife Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, daughter of real estate magnate John Arrillaga and a well-known philanthropist herself, said that when many tech entrepreneurs look at the health-care system they see the “data of billions of people,” collected through blood tests, online profiles, food purchases and fitness trackers.
“When that data can be accessed and mined and utilized for good in an instantaneous manner,” she said, “that would be shattering in a positive way for the system as we know it.”
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Once, two-thirds of scientific and medical research was funded by the federal government, beholden to the public good. Now, two-thirds is funded by private industry, a growing share by billionaires accountable to no one and impatient with the pace of innovation.