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How one of the world’s most prolific inventors is guiding a plan to tackle all disease

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“Why are we doing this test that may cost us the life of our unborn baby?”

That’s the question Stephen Quake asked himself when his pregnant wife needed amniocentesis during her pregnancy with their first baby. It’s a scary and invasive test that comes with risks ranging from cramping and infection to preterm labor, fetal deformities and miscarriage.

While the experience was stressful, it also motivated Quake to eventually develop a blood test to replace amniocentesis. Now, he said, about “8 million (people) a year receive those tests. There’s thousands of unnecessary deaths avoided because people are not using amniocentesis and other invasive tests.”

A long-time health innovator who’s worked in a range of industry and university roles, Quake — who MIT has called one of the most prolific inventors in the world — has often been driven by personal experience and the desire to help others facing similar challenges.

He said there’s a “very direct connection between lived experiences as a parent and husband and the kinds of things I work on in the lab.”

Quake also seems to be everywhere at once. He’s the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and professor of applied physics at Stanford University and leads the eponymous Quake Lab there. He was the founding co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors.

And this summer, he stepped into a high-profile position as head of science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic organization established and owned by Facebook (now named Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan. The initiative’s mission is to cure, prevent or manage all human diseases by the end of the century. He’s doing this while continuing his work at Stanford.


“This is an unbelievably rare opportunity and a luxury to have this 100-year timescale.”

Stephen Quake

Head of science, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative


In 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan pledged 99% of their lifetime Facebook shares to advance CZI’s mission, and since its launch in 2015, the initiative has awarded roughly $4.84 billion in grants and more than $300 million in venture capital investing in companies whose values and mission match CZI’s.

The science arm of CZI takes a three-pronged approach to its work: “Doing science through founding institutes, funding science through grant giving and building open-source software to accelerate science,” Quake said. “It’s my job as head of science to oversee all that and help it move forward to work on deeply inspiring, big problems that are going to ultimately affect human health.”

For example, CZI in October announced a funding commitment with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will award $2 million to researchers who are investigating and detecting novel and emerging pathogens with applications in human health, zoonosis, vector-borne diseases and antimicrobial resistance.

The initiative said it would work with the U.K. Biobank and other partners to conduct a repeat set of multi-organ imaging scans on 60,000 U.K. Biobank participants to help researchers assess changes in physiology over time.

Going all in

Quake has been interested in science and technology since childhood. The son of a software entrepreneur, he learned how to program computers on punch cards during his childhood in upstate New York. He translated that enthusiasm into a computer camp he ran for the other children in his neighborhood, and eventually, all that time in front of the screen gave him quick hands on the keyboard. Once, while accompanying his dad to a computer expo in Las Vegas, he even entered — and won — a contest to see who could type a company’s I marketing slogan the fastest.

“They made it difficult by having capital letters in the middle of the words and things like that,” he said. “While they were doing their marketing pitch, I went and practiced on the computer until I had the phrase perfectly memorized.”

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