Facebook Founder's Wife Talks About Braintree, Quincy Childhood

BRAINTREE, MA — She may live in Silicon Valley and travel the world for her work as a philanthropist, but Priscilla Chan stays true to her Massachusetts roots.

"I know that's a gross generalization, but I feel it every time I go home," Chan said during an interview on "First Opinion," a podcast produced by STAT News. Chan, who grew up in Braintree and graduated from Quincy High School, said she still makers regular return trips to Massachusetts to visit her parents, who live in Braintree.

Chan may best be known as the wife of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but she is also a former pediatrician and the chief executive of the couple's charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Chan was on the podcast to discuss the nonprofit's support for pediatric single-cell research for children with rare diseases.

Chan's parents are Chinese immigrants who escaped Vietnam on a refugee boat. They settled in Braintree, where they raised Chan and two younger sisters. After Chan graduated from Quincy High School, she enrolled in Harvard, where she met Zuckerberg in 2003. Chan and Zuckerberg have two kids and live in Palo Alto, CA.

Chan described the west coast as a "different vibe," where it's about "doing things and seeing things differently."

"There's something still really powerful for me for the east coast," Chan said on the podcast. "The east coast to me is so much about academics and truth and sort of building upon what is the great institutions of our country."

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative focuses on education, politics, housing and economic opportunity and scientific research. Under the nonprofit's scientific research arm, it invests in pediatric single-cell research to identify and cure rare diseases in children. During the podcast, Chan said there's an urgent need for this type of research and spoke about her own experience as a pediatrician trying to treat her patients, when a diagnosis wasn't clear.

She said single cell biology is about understanding how different cells in the body interpret the same DNA differently.

"Every cell in your body has the same DNA, it has the same basic ingredients," Chan said. "Each cell has a different interpretation and recipe of that original reading."

With diseases like Cystic fibrosis, Chan said cells in the lungs misread the DNA's instructions and cause problems. She said pharmaceutical companies are now producing medicine that takes those DNA instructions into account to try to address the problem.

For more from Chan on single cell research, listen to STAT New's "Opinion Podcast."