As the chief philanthropic vehicle of Meta multibillionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has the financial resources to take on big challenges. It has done so: CZI set a goal to drive biomedical research that will enable the cure or treatment of all human disease by the end of the century. Running that effort for the foreseeable future will be Stephen Quake, a Stanford University professor of bioengineering and applied physics, newly named head of science for CZI.
In fact, Quake has been a CZI insider for several years. He was the founding co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, launched in 2016 as a research institute partnering UC San Francisco, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The Biohub takes on major research questions in cell biology and infectious disease, and builds new tools and software needed to advance the science. Central among the Biohub’s programs are its Tabula projects — whole-organism atlases of cells in various animals and how they function, which are central to CZI’s mission to address all human disease.
Quake has received numerous awards and other recognition for his research and discoveries, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors. Among his accomplishments was the development of a widely used prenatal blood test for premature birth, Down syndrome and other genetic disorders.
Now just weeks into his new job, Quake spoke with me recently about his background as a scientist, his new role as a philanthropic administrator, and CZI’s future as a supporter of science. Some of our conversation is below, edited slightly for clarity.
In layperson’s terms, what sort of science have you specialized in?
That’s definitely evolved over the course of my career. I trained as a physicist, got my doctorate in theoretical physics, and then became an experimentalist, working in biophysics. I made my career at this intersection of physics, biology and technology. Early in my career, the things I was interested in were really more physical in nature — how do polymers work, and how do you apply forces with light, and that sort of thing. Then it evolved into understanding basic biology and the biophysics perspective, and then it evolved into building tools to do better measurement. That took me in the direction of cell biology and also some clinically translational things around diagnostics and therapeutics. Today, I’d say my primary interests are around understanding the complexity of cells, how they work together in tissues and how multicellular organisms evolved.
Is that what led you to the CZ Biohub?
Absolutely. In the earlier part of my career, I was obsessed with inventing tools to measure single cells and measure genomes and transcriptomes from single cells. The founding goal of the Biohub was to bring together the three universities — Stanford, UCSF and Berkeley — to work on big, collaborative projects they wouldn’t be able to do on their own and be their kind of organizing force. The cell atlases are a good example of that — the Tabula sapiens was published this year, and had something like 160 authors from all three institutions. The Biohub provided a way to do the science at a scale that was much more than one could do as an individual professor or even in an individual university. We’ve been able to embark on really large projects to characterize all the cell types in a given organism — mouse, fly, lemur, human. These have all been signature efforts of the Biohub.
You’ve had a fertile career as an academic researcher. What made you think being head of science at CZI would be a good job for you?
You know, I didn’t want to do it. I had done the Biohub because I felt an obligation to the scientific community and my colleagues to give back. When I was a junior faculty member I had senior colleagues who looked out for me and did selfless things to help me, and the Biohub was my opportunity to give back. But I was ready to go back to my lab, frankly. When Mark and Priscilla gave me this new opportunity to be head of science, it was unexpected. I had to rethink my plans a little bit. It’s a once-in-a-century opportunity to work with philanthropists of their magnitude. It was sort of a historic opportunity and I decided to take a swing at it.
Have you left academia?
I haven’t completely left academia; my research group is still alive. It’s smaller than it was. But I find that being able to interact with students and postdocs, and to puzzle over data and figure out how to write papers keeps it very real for me and helps me remain grounded in my role as a philanthropic administrator.
What general or specific goals do you want to accomplish as head of science at CZI?
I’m only six weeks in, so I’ll be light on the specifics for the moment. But I think at a broad level, Mark and Priscilla have asked me to help bring focus to their science philanthropy. They started off over the last five years with a bunch of experiments, sort of running independently, and it’s my job to get them all aligned. And to work on deeply inspiring projects that really move the needle. That is the remit, and it’s a super-exciting one. I get to define it, and we’re going through a big exercise doing that within the organization right now. Mark and Priscilla have this strong belief that to understand diseases, and ultimately have impact on them, you have got to be able to measure biology and have better measurement tools. And so there’s been a focus on that for the first decade, and we’ll see the products of that in the long term.
What sort of adjustments to the trajectory at CZI do you think you might want to make?
The part of the organization that reports to me is about 150 people, and I’m still getting to know them all. I’m super-impressed with the quality of the organization and I feel like I’ve been dealt a very good hand. So we’re going through the planning process right now of how to tweak the organization, and it’s too early to say what it’s going to be. But there’ll be a few shifts as we figure out where we want to go. We’ll have a good sense of that at the beginning of next year.
Do you think the experience of the COVID pandemic that we collectively had during the last three years has changed how the public sees the biomedical sciences?
All our lives have been transformed by the pandemic experience, not just in science, not just in academia, not just in philanthropy. I’d like to think there’s a greater appreciation by the general public for the role of science in their lives — both the strengths and the weaknesses of it. People saw how the scientific community and the public health community were struggling with what it meant to deal with the pandemic, what it means to move around in a fog of confusion and lack of knowledge as you’re trying to understand the true landscape of what this virus was, and what it meant, and how you treat people. That uncertainty, which is so integral to science, is probably more appreciated now, for better or worse. And hopefully, there’s also an appreciation for the value of science — I don’t think it’s too strong of a statement to say science saved the world here. In the space of a year, vaccines and therapeutics were developed that saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. That’s a triumph of science. Nobody, even within the scientific community, thought that was possible. It was spectacular.