Produced by Tiger Sniff Mobile Group
Author|Ji Nan
Header image: Visual China
Chen Tianqiao, who has not appeared in the public eye for a long time, recently "swiped the screen" again because of a foreign media report.
According to foreign media, the 50-year-old Chen Tianqiao spent $85 million in 2015 to buy 198,000 acres of forest land in Oregon, USA, and was successfully selected into the list of 100 American "landlords" selected by the American magazine "Land Report", ranking 82nd.
As the youngest "richest man in China" and "godfather of games", Chen Tianqiao once led the development trend of China's online game industry, Hurun once commented: "This very distinctive Chinese entrepreneur has become a super-rich man by starting a business at the fastest speed, just as fast as Facebook's Zuckerberg." ”
Sadly, in Shanda's subsequent transformation, Chen Tianqiao's attempts to new businesses mostly ended in failure, and Chen Tianqiao suffered from severe anxiety under the pressure, and often woke up in the middle of the night, and he began to realize that "something terrible had happened to him".
And the only way to survive is to leave the company he founded.
The days of his illness completely changed Chen Tianqiao. In the past decade, Chen Tianqiao jumped out of the Internet field, took his savings and escaped into the field of "brain science", and "threw money" everywhere, investing in many brain science research institutions and scientists with half charity and half donation.
When asked why he should invest in "brain science", he replied: "Desire and fear of loss come from our brains, and if we never understand how the brain really works, how can we know how the cost of repair should be?"
Now ten years later, Chen Tianqiao's investment in the field of brain science is roughly estimated to be billions of yuan, and for a field such as brain science, which has a long investment cycle and cannot be quantified, what research results has Chen Tianqiao achieved?
Chen's Brain Science Investment: A Game of Chess between China and the United States
Most of Chen's investments in brain science are channelled through a US$1 billion foundation called the Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI), focusing on three key areas: brain discovery, brain therapy, and brain development.
Back in December 2016, when the foundation was first built, Chen Tianqiao announced a donation of $115 million to the California Institute of Technology for the establishment of the Tianqiao Brain Science Institute on campus. The move sparked a wave of condemnation in China, with public opinion asking why Chen Tianqiao didn't donate to support the development of brain science in China first.
In the days that followed, Chen Tianqiao made many "donation" investments in China and the United States, and the two sides bet and fought high.
In the United States, in addition to the construction of a neuroscience research institute at the California Institute of Technology, TCCI has also set up a brain-computer interface center in the college to directly support related clinical research and application exploration. Spearheaded by Richard Andersen, a professor of neuroscience at Caltech, TCCI has established a research team with backgrounds from prestigious universities.
In addition, Chen Tianqiao has repeatedly invested hundreds of millions of yuan to promote research in the intersection of artificial intelligence and brain science, such as the establishment of a new MindX laboratory last year, with a start-up fund of 100 million US dollars, aiming to combine in-depth research on the human brain in the fields of learning, memory, cognition, emotion, etc., to promote the further development of artificial intelligence.
In China, TCCI has jointly established the Shanghai Chen Tianqiao International Institute of Brain Diseases, Huashan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University and Shanghai Zhou Liangfu Medical Development Fund, aiming to provide better treatment options for brain-related diseases and develop new clinical drugs.
On the other hand, it announced cooperation with the Shanghai Mental Health Center to build an artificial intelligence and mental health laboratory to explore the transformation and application of artificial intelligence in the field of mental health and mental health.
Source: Fudan University official website
In terms of influence, thanks to the leading position and talent supply in the field of global brain science in China and the United States, TCCI has developed into one of the world's most well-known and large-scale research institutions supporting human brain science research, and has published research results in global authoritative journals such as Nature.
In addition to his academic donations, Tianqiao Chen's investments include companies in the fields of brain science and healthcare. According to the statistics of Yijian Finance, Shanghai Shanda has invested in 9 enterprises in the past three years, mainly in the medical and health field, and most of the financing rounds participated before the A round.
Source: Yijian Finance
Among them, it is worth mentioning Brain Tiger Technology, which is an invasive brain-computer interface company, which has Chen Tianqiao from angel round to Pre-A round and A round of financing.
In July last year, Brain Tiger Technology released seven phased new scientific research achievements at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in one go, spanning academic, scientific research, medical and clinical fields, and officially announced the world's first experiment of implanting a semi-invasive brain-computer interface device into rhesus macaques, allowing rhesus monkeys to play table tennis games through their minds.
Interestingly, in December last year, Nature Neuroscience, a sub-journal of the top academic journal "Nature", also announced a research result: a research team at the California Institute of Technology in the United States has developed an emerging technology for functional ultrasound (fUS) neuroimaging based on brain-computer interface (BMI). Experimental testing on two rhesus macaques led to the discovery that fUS technology could be the basis for an "online" BMI – it could read brain activity and decipher its meaning by deciphering its meaning with a decoder programmed with machine learning to control a computer with extremely short latency that accurately predicted movement. This is actually in line with the new results released by Brain Tiger Technology in July last year.
In the connection, Chen Tianqiao's investment in the field of brain science can be regarded as a "game of chess", on which there are not only scientists who study basic science, but also technology companies that undertake applications, and under the cooperation of TCCI and Shanghai Shanda, the brain science achievements researched by Chinese and American scientists can be interconnected and complementary, and the three elements of talents, academic research and product application form a closed loop.
But - there are achievements, but there are no breakthroughs
It should be clarified that at present, the progress of brain science related research in the world is relatively slow, and the reasons behind it are complex and diverse.
On the one hand, the brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body, and its structure and function are extremely complex. The diversity of the nervous system, the way it connects, and the interactions between neurons make it very challenging to study.
Moreover, the study of the brain requires advanced technologies and tools, such as brain imaging technology, gene editing technology, etc., and the development of these technologies requires time and resources, so if you want to achieve results in the field of brain science, you must have a lot of money and resources.
On the other hand, there are certain ethical and regulatory issues with brain science research. The study of brain science, which often involves experimentation on humans and animals, has raised a series of ethical and regulatory questions. Therefore, ensuring the ethics and legitimacy of the research also requires a certain amount of time for the public to accept.
Crucially, brain science is a highly interdisciplinary field that involves multiple disciplines such as neuroscience, computer science, psychology, biology, and more. Experts in different fields need to work together, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of research and communication. Therefore, there is no large-scale and systematic brain science research organization in the world.
The TCCI founded by Chen Tianqiao has indeed provided a strong impetus for the development of global brain science, which is inseparable from TCCI's research route in brain science.
The first is interdisciplinary integration, focusing on multidisciplinary integration. TCCI is not limited to traditional neurobiology and medicine, but also closely integrates with cutting-edge fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering to promote the research and development of brain-computer interface technology, big data analysis, and intelligent medical devices.
Second, as mentioned above, Chen Tianqiao has formed a global cooperation network through investment in the field of brain science in China and the United States, established an international scientific research cooperation network, and carried out in-depth cooperation with the world's top universities, research institutions and hospitals to jointly carry out cutting-edge brain science research projects.
The third is the direction of innovative research. Unlike Neuralink, a brain-computer interface company founded by Elon Musk, TCCI is more inclined to non-invasive brain-computer interface technology. For example, the "functional ultrasound (fUS) neuroimaging technology" described above, developed by Professor Richard Andersen's team at the California Institute of Technology, works by emitting high-frequency sound pulses and then measuring the echo of these sound vibrations in matter, such as various tissues of the human body, which is a much less invasive way to read brain activity.
Finally, there is the massive financial investment, with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding provided by Chen Tianqiao each year, which allows TCCI to attract the world's top scientists and conduct long-term, high-risk research projects that are expected to lead to major breakthroughs.
Ultrasound technology realizes non-invasive brain reading, source: physicist organization network
Objectively speaking, TCCI has indeed made certain achievements in the field of brain science research. First of all, in terms of the number of research papers produced, through a search on PubMed, it can be seen that TCCI has published a total of 88 papers in the past 7 years, and many of them have been published in top international journals.
For example, Mao Ying's team at Huashan Hospital confirmed for the first time that chronic cerebral hypoperfusion of moyamoya disease can independently cause changes in AD markers, and published the research results in the top international journal of neurology "Alzheimer's & Dementia"; On the official website of the journal, three TCCI-funded brain science-related research articles were also published.
However, TCCI is still not a major breakthrough in brain science research, because on the one hand, academic research results have not yet been translated into product application value, and on the other hand, the current research has not yet been able to answer the core question that Chen Tianqiao wants to figure out - what is the real operating mechanism of the brain, and how the operating mechanism of the brain is formed.
And the ultimate proposition behind this is likely to be deduced as "how human self-consciousness is formed". Obviously, this is more of a philosophical question than a scientific one, and no one can solve it.
A Buddhist's Investment: Making Money to Nurture the "Brain"
According to public information, Chen Tianqiao believed in the Buddha during his illness, which made him determined to "focus on how to alleviate this pain and suffering", which is why he chose to invest in the field of brain science.
On the whole, Chen Tianqiao's investment in the field of brain science is not too much to say that he is a "great benevolent" who does not ask for returns. Because among all the basic science research, brain science is probably the most difficult to evaluate and the most difficult to invest in, not only does it have a long investment cycle, but the investment results cannot be quantified.
Chen Tianqiao once described it in an interview with Tencent's Gu Yu: "I want to predict whether he will be a good marathon runner when he runs five meters in a marathon, but this is difficult to do in the field of brain science." You know you may be wrong in your judgment, you may come back in ten years, and maybe you won't come back. It's going to be wasted, but you have to do it. ”
Fortunately, Chen Tianqiao's investment strength as the former richest man in China is still online. According to Shanda China's official website, in the past 20 years, Shanda China has invested in 156 entrepreneurial projects, with an annualized investment return of more than 40%.
The land owned by Chen Tianqiao in this foreign media report has also increased a lot compared with 2015. According to data disclosed by the New York Post, farmland has been a popular asset for super-wealthy investors in recent years, with the average value of U.S. farmland rising by 8.1% in 2023 alone, and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the value of U.S. farmland has risen by more than a third since 2020.
From this point of view, even if the investment cycle of brain science is long and the prospect is unpredictable, as long as Chen Tianqiao ensures that investment in other fields can make money, then his brain science research can continue.
Looking back on the days when Chen Tianqiao dominated China's online games, you will find that Chen Tianqiao, who experienced a serious illness, has changed, he came out of the "virtual world" and found his "salvation" in brain science, but at the same time, you will also feel that he is still the same Chen Tianqiao - seeing future opportunities before others and bravely betting.
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