Chen Tianqiao, who has not appeared in the public eye for a long time, recently hit the screen again because of a foreign media report. According to foreign media, 50-year-old Chen Tianqiao spent US$85 million to purchase 198,000 acres of forestland in Oregon, USA, in 2015, and was successfully selected into the list of 100 American "landowners" selected by the American magazine "Land Report", ranking 82nd.
As the youngest "China's richest man" and "Game Godfather", Chen Tianqiao once led the development trend of China's online game industry. Hurun once commented: "This unique Chinese entrepreneur became a super rich man through entrepreneurship as quickly as possible, just as fast as Facebook's Zuckerberg."
Regrettably, during Shanda's subsequent transformation, most of Chen Tianqiao's new business attempts ended in failure. Under the pressure, Chen Tianqiao suffered from severe anxiety and often woke up in the middle of the night. He began to realize that "terrible things had happened to him."
And the only way to survive was to leave the company he founded.
The days of illness completely changed Chen Tianqiao. In the past ten years, Chen Tianqiao has jumped out of the Internet field and entered the field of "brain science" with his savings. He has "spread money" everywhere and invested in many brain science research institutions and scientists on a half-charity and half-donation basis.
When talking about why he should invest in the field of "brain science", his answer was: "Desires and fears of loss all come from our brains. If we never understand the real operating mechanism of the brain, then how can we understand what 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 several billion yuan. For a field like brain science, which has a long investment cycle and cannot be quantified,What research results has Chen Tianqiao achieved? Can you really make money by investing in brain science?
Chen’s Brain Science Investment: China and the United States “a game of chess”
Most of Chen Tianqiao's investments in the field of brain science are made through a foundation called Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute (hereinafter referred to as TCCI), with an investment scale of US$1 billion, mainly focusing on the three key areas of brain discovery, brain treatment and brain development.
Looking back in December 2016, when the foundation was first established, Chen Tianqiao announced a donation of US$115 million to the California Institute of Technology to establish the Tianqiao Brain Science Institute on campus. This move triggered a wave of condemnation in China, with public opinion questioning why Chen Tianqiao did not donate to support the development of brain science in China in the first place.
In the days that followed,Chen Tianqiao has made many "donation-type" investments in China and the United States, and the two parties have made bets and fought high.
In the United States, in addition to assisting the California Institute of Technology in building a neuroscience institute, TCCI has also established a brain-computer interface center within the college to directly support relevant clinical research and application exploration with funds. Led by Richard Andersen, professor of neuroscience at California Institute of Technology, TCCI has established a research team with backgrounds from major 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. For example, he established the MindX laboratory last year with a start-up funding of US$100 million, aiming to combine in-depth research on the human brain in areas such as learning, memory, cognition, and emotion to promote the further development of artificial intelligence.
In China, TCCI, on the one hand, jointly established the Shanghai Chen Tianqiao International Brain Disease Institute with Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University and the Shanghai Zhou Liangfu Medical Development Fund, aiming to provide better treatments for brain-related diseases and develop new clinical drugs.
On the other hand, it announced a cooperation with the Shanghai Mental Health Center to build an artificial intelligence and mental health laboratory to explore the transformational application of artificial intelligence in the field of mental health and mental health.
Source: Fudan University official website
From the perspective of influence, thanks to the leading positions and talent supply of China and the United States in the field of global brain science, TCCI has now developed into one of the world's most well-known and largest research institutions supporting human brain research, and has published research results in authoritative global journals such as Nature magazine.
In addition to donations in academia, Chen Tianqiao's investment scope also includes companies in the fields of brain science and medical health. According to Yijian Finance statistics, Shanghai Shanda has invested in 9 companies in the past three years, mainly in the medical and health field, and most of the financing rounds it participated in were before Series A.
Source: Yijian Finance
Among them, it is worth mentioning that Brain Tiger Technology is an invasive brain-computer interface company. Chen Tianqiao has been involved in its angel round, Pre-A round and A round of financing.
In July last year, Brain Tiger Technology released seven new phased scientific research results at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), spanning academic, scientific research, medical clinical and other fields, and officially announced that it had achieved the world's first experiment of implanting a semi-invasive brain-computer interface device into rhesus monkeys, allowing rhesus monkeys to play table tennis games through their thoughts.
Interestingly, in December last year, the top academic journal "Nature" sub-journal "Nature Neuroscience" also announced a research result: a research team from the California Institute of Technology in the United States developed an emerging technology of functional ultrasound (fUS) neuroimaging based on the brain-computer interface (BMI). Through experimental testing on two rhesus monkeys, it was ultimately discovered that fUS technology could form the basis of an "online" BMI - it could read brain activity, decipher its meaning through a decoder programmed with machine learning, and thereby control a computer with extremely short latency and accurate prediction of movement. This is actually in line with the new results released by Brain Tiger Technology in July last year.
Let’s connect it.Chen Tianqiao’s investment in the field of brain science can be regarded as a “game of chess”.On the chessboard there are scientists who study basic science, as well as technology companies that undertake applications. Moreover, with the cooperation between TCCI and Shanghai Shanda, the brain science results developed by Chinese and American scientists can achieve interoperability and complementation.The three elements of talent, academic research, and product application form a closed loop.
But - there are achievements, but no breakthroughs
One thing that needs to be clarified is that currently, the progress of related research in global brain science 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, with extremely complex structure and functions. The diversity of nervous systems, the way they are connected, and the interactions between neurons make them very challenging to study.
Moreover, studying the brain requires advanced technologies and tools, such as brain imaging technology, gene editing technology, etc. The development of these technologies requires time and resources. Therefore, to achieve results in the field of brain science, a large amount of funds and resources are required.
On the other hand, there are certain ethical and regulatory issues in brain science research. Brain science research often involves experiments on humans and animals, which has raised a series of ethical and regulatory issues. Therefore, ensuring the ethics and legality of the research will also take some time for public acceptance.
The most important thing is thatBrain science is a highly interdisciplinary field involving neuroscience, computer science, psychology, biology and other disciplines.Experts in different fields need to work together, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of research and communication. Therefore, no large-scale and systematic brain research organization was born 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 cross-integration of multiple disciplines. 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 equipment.
Second, as mentioned above, Chen Tianqiao has formed a global cooperation network by investing in the field of brain science in China and the United States, establishing an international scientific research cooperation network, and conducting in-depth cooperation with the world's top universities, research institutions and hospitals to jointly carry out cutting-edge brain research projects.
The third is innovative research direction. Unlike Neuralink (a brain-computer interface company) founded by Musk, TCCI prefers non-invasive brain-computer interface technology. For example, the "Functional Ultrasound (fUS) neuroimaging technology" mentioned above was developed by the team of Professor Richard Andersen at the California Institute of Technology. Its technical working principle is to emit high-frequency sound pulses and then measure the echoes of these sound vibrations in substances (such as various tissues of the human body). This is a much less invasive method of reading brain activity.
Finally, there is large-scale financial investment. The hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support provided by Chen Tianqiao every year can allow TCCI to attract the world's top scientists and conduct long-term, high-risk research projects that are expected to produce major breakthroughs.
Ultrasonic technology enables non-invasive brain reading, source: Physicist Organization Network
Objectively speaking, TCCI has indeed achieved certain results in the field of brain science research. First of all, looking at the number of research papers produced, a search on PubMed shows that TCCI has published a total of 88 papers in the past seven years, many of which have been published in top international publications.
For example, Mao Ying's team at Huashan Hospital confirmed for the first time that chronic cerebral hypoperfusion in moyamoya disease can independently cause AD marker changes, and published the research results in the top international neurology journal "Alzheimer's & Dementia"; Tianqiao Brain Science Research Institute Researcher Yuan Tifei and others also published research results on "The role of the 'placebo effect' in the treatment of depression with TMS" in the Nature sub-journal; three TCCI-funded brain science-related research articles were also published on the official website of the world-renowned "Science" magazine.
However, TCCI’s current research on brain science is still not a major breakthrough. On the one hand, the academic research results have not yet been transformed into product application value. On the other hand, the current research cannot yet answer the core question that Chen Tianqiao wants to understand——What is the real operating mechanism of the brain, and how the operating mechanism of the brain is formed.
The ultimate proposition behind this is likely to be deduced as "how human self-awareness is formed." Obviously, this is more of a philosophical question than a scientific question at the moment, and no one can solve it.
A Buddhist’s Investment: Making Money to Feed Your “Brain”
According to public information, Chen Tianqiao believed in Buddhism during his illness, which made him determined to "focus on how to alleviate this pain and suffering." This is also the reason why he chose the field of brain science to invest.
Looking at Chen Tianqiao’s investment in the field of brain science as a whole,It is not an exaggeration to say that he is a "good man" who does not ask for anything in return.Because among all basic science research, brain science is probably the most difficult field to evaluate and invest in. Not only does the investment cycle take a long time, but the investment results cannot be quantified.
In an interview with Tencent Guyu, Chen Tianqiao once described it this way: "I want to predict whether he is 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 that your judgment may be wrong, and you may come back in ten years, and you may not come back. This money will 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, Shanda China has invested in a total of 156 entrepreneurial projects in the past 20 years, with annual investment returns exceeding 40%.
The land owned by Chen Tianqiao in this foreign media report has also increased in value compared with 2015. According to data disclosed by the New York Post, farmland has been a popular asset for ultra-wealthy investors in recent years. The average value of U.S. farmland rose by 8.1% in 2023 alone; according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the value of U.S. farmland has risen by more than one-third since 2020.
Looking at it this way, even if the investment cycle of brain science is long and the prospects are unpredictable, as long as Chen Tianqiao ensures that investments in other fields can make money, his brain science research can continue.
Looking back at the days when Chen Tianqiao dominated Chinese online games, you will find that Chen Tianqiao has changed after experiencing a serious illness. 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 back then - seeing future opportunities before others and making brave bets.