Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder turned billionaire philanthropist, will donate $100 million to create a research center tasked with investigating the inner workings of human cells. The ultimate goal is to deepen our understanding of how diseases emerge and how they can be treated and prevented.

"Cells are the fundamental units of life, with every disease we know of affecting particular types of cells," said Allen, in a press release from the new center. "We conceived of the Allen Institute for Cell Science as a catalyzing force to integrate technologies and approaches at a large scale in order to provide an exceptional resource for the entire scientific community."

The institute will be based in Seattle.

For its first project, the Allen Cell Observatory, more than 70 scientists will collaborate to create a visual database describing in great detail how every kind of cell works, down the molecular level, so that their normal behavior can be predicted and their aberrant behavior demystified. In an interview with Nature News, the center's new executive director, cell biologist Rick Horwitz, compared this unified effort to the Manhattan Project.