Chen Tianqiao (Photo: Sanjit Das/BB)
Shanda Investment Group founder Tianqiao Chen has dedicated $1 billion to help with research that he says may be on the cusp of major breakthroughs related to the human brain.
The 45-year-old resident of Menlo Park, California, says a better understanding of how the brain works could help treat mental disorders and neurodegenerative diseases for which cures remain elusive. A former tech titan in China, Chen dropped out of public view in 2012 to focus on his own mental health. This also led him to turn his attention and half of his personal fortune to brain research.
His donations include a $115 million gift to create a neuroscience institute at the California Institute of Technology and 500 million yuan ($72.9 million) to establish a similar unit with Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital, a leading neurology facility in China. Chen spoke with Bloomberg News in an interview last month.
After becoming a billionaire at 30, what is your next challenge?
Everybody thinks about how to achieve wealth, how to be become rich — this must be the first mountain. We climbed the first mountain, I was lucky. After I got sick and after the panic attacks began, I started to think that I could do more to help people directly. If we cannot avoid death, let's try to relieve the pain and suffering. What we mean is chronic pain: suffering, including depression, anxiety.
We talked to many scientists and realized it was going to be a long journey, because pain is not just simply a feeling, pain is a manipulation of your brain. The only way to cure it is to understand the mystery of our brain, how we perceive pain. Now, with the development of many new technologies, we can adopt a bottom-up approach: we can understand our brain from a molecular level, the circuits and patterns, how the memory forms, how emotions form.
So the second mountain is tall, but we're excited because I think it's the right time for humans to answer these questions. Maybe our donation, this $1 billion investment, can be a catalyst for discovery.
What do you think is possible in your lifetime?
From a scientific perspective, we cannot set any goals or targets for within my lifetime, for humanity, because there's no ultimate or so-called single truth for science. But from the technology and practical perspective, of course we have some expectations.
