Google Tackles Health

Google has announced the formation of a new company called Calico, which aims to promote health and fight aging. Larry Page said, "That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses." He expanded upon this in an interview with Time: "I'm not proposing that we spend all of our money on those kinds of speculative things. But we should be spending a commensurate amount with what normal types of companies spend on research and development, and spend it on things that are a little more long-term and a little more ambitious than people normally would. More like moon shots." The new company's CEO will be Arthur Levinson, who is currently the chairman of Apple and biotech company Genentech. Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way."

Comments

how about fighting poverty

[spune]

1/5 children in America live in poverty. 2/5 lack adequate nutrition. But let's instead focus on improving the quality of life and longevity of the wealthy!

Re:how about fighting poverty

[h4rr4r]

I think you mean a War against the Poor, aka the War on Drugs. A war on poverty would include things like access to healthcare, or equalizing education funds for schools, or job training, or any attempt to make folks other than entertainers famous.

Re:how about fighting poverty

[Andrio]

Fighting poverty would require such things like raising the minimum wage to something you can live off of (this just failed to happen in DC, for people employed by major retailers like Walmart), putting a cap on interest rates by credit cards/loans, increasing education spending, etc.

All these things are impossible to do by anyone as long as companies are allowed to buy what they want from politicians.

Re:how about fighting poverty

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Google a government agency or a charity organization?

Re:how about fighting poverty

[Anonymous Coward]

If old people could take care of themselves and didn't need to retire (at least not permanently), that would be a tremendous boon for everyone, including the poor. They'd no longer need to save for retirement, or more realistically, they'd no longer be up sheet creek once they get old and quickly burn through whatever savings they had while being unable to work anymore. Health care costs would decrease dramatically if old people got sick at no more than the rate that young people do. So even if we grant your premise that only things that directly help the poor are worth doing, research into fighting aging very much meets that bar. Of course, even if I'll easily grant you that helping the poor is important and worthwhile, your premise is completely bat shit insane - but that's a post for another time.

Re:how about fighting poverty

[geek]

Yeah, it sounds like Cook is talking about Jobs. Boo Hoo... He was a rich (dick) who died relatively young.

Regardless of whether Jobs was a dick, he certainly was rich. He didn't die because of a lack of health care, he died because he was fucking stupid and didn't listen to his doctors, and pursued homeopathic bullshit remedies for an aggressive pancreatic cancer.

Jobs would likely be here today running Apple had he not been a fucking idiot hippie with a grudge against modern medicine. In Jobs case, natural selection was not his friend.

Re:how about fighting poverty

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Hint: rich people don't 'sit on their money' like Scrooge McDuck in your comic books. They invest it in the businesses that provide jobs for those poor people.

Not really, no. They usually have a diverse investment portfolio beyond a certain level, some in property, some in stocks and bonds, and the rest in various other investment vehicles. You don't get rich and stay rich by doing anything as risky as actually starting viable businesses (90% failure rate is a sucker's game), even VCs are only in it as long as it takes to pump up the company and sell it on to some starry eyed boob, or at least another VC who thinks they can pump it up even further.

Ah you say, but stocks are investing a company, again not really, at least after the first sale. There's no particular reason they have to buy stocks directly from the company, they could just buy from a previous investor, and the value of the stocks rarely has anything to do with the performance of a company. A positive or negative article in the Financial Times can have more of an impact on the value of a stock than any number of profitable quarters.

If the only way to increase wealth was to directly invest in businesses, then yes you'd have a point. But unfortunately it's not, and is in fact a rather poor approach to investment.

Re:They care..... sure....

[geek]

You think they don't already have health data on people? How many times did you google herpes this year? Did you email your parents/kids telling them about your shingles, bad knees, bad eyesite?

If other people over the age of 50-60 are anything like my parents and parents in law, virtually every conversation revolves around their new ailments. Google has a crap ton of this info in their systems already and are fully prepared to start spamming the latest Cialis ads at every that's every used the word "dick" in an email.

This is not about you and me.

[Gavin Scott]

This is not about you and me and our health data, it's about some billionaires who (understandably) don't want to see what happened to Steve Jobs happen to them.

You can sit around and say this is Evil and whatnot, but honestly would any of us here behave any differently if we were in their position?

Note that the president of the new company Calico is Art Levinson, who is currently also Chairman of Genentech and *Apple* so there's a direct Steve Jobs link here and even a quote in the press release from Tim Cook:

Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said: “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”

So this is all very science-fiction (both from a technology *and* a social point of view) and it will be fascinating to watch.

From a Science point of view this is really interesting because at the moment there are relatively few sources of funding for basic life-extension research, since much research money comes from the government, and making people live longer is no more politically acceptable than talking about population control. So if you're a fan of applied biological research and specifically life-extension technologies then you should be pretty excited by Google's move here.

Interesting times.

G.

P.S. I for one welcome our new genetically enhanced immortal geek overlords.