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Google Snapping Up Top Biomedical Talent (nature.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google is expanding its scope once again. The company has been pushing hard to lure top physicians and researchers in the life sciences away from their prestigious academic posts. Google is easily able to pay more than universities, and they also offer a different type of focus. "Silicon Valley offers strong technology resources that are hard to access in academia, Topol says, as well as the opportunity to pursue goals that are difficult to reach for in academia, where scientists are not typically rewarded for pursuing real-world applications." Other companies are starting to push into this sector as well, but none of them match Google's efforts; it's estimated the company is now pouring a billion dollars a year into life-sciences research.
my daddy was right. should have taken up fishing.
And a princess can employ a materials scientist, but there's going to be a lot more innovation in textile design if the guy isn't wasting his mind making pretty dresses all day.
The best researchers could always accept a higher paying commercial gig, but don't. My discipline is mathematics and, well, making money would be a much easier intellectual challenge than the ones I choose to face.
All your base (pairs) are belong to us!
(Along with all of your proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and damned well everything else you have.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Silicon valley can ruin biomedical research like they ruined CS research!
Is this really Google's doing because none of this seems to be search engine related. It seems far more likely that this is Alphabet's doing.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If Google was to invest in drug research and make the resulting drugs available at a reasonable cost, that would be awesome.
Pretty soon, all will be Google....everything will be Google, and Google will be everything.
You''ll get up out for your Google bed, have Google brand eggs and pancakes, wash it down with Google OJ and Google coffee while watching GoogleTV, then get in your self-driving Googlemobile and go to work at Google.
You'll poop in Google brand toilets, wipe with Googlepaper, wash your hands with Google soap and then walk on Google carpeting back to your GoogleCube where you will happily toil in the employ of Google. If you're a good Google employee, you may be allowed to name your firstborn child "Google" (or "Googlette" if it's a girl.)
Later, you'll die in a Google Assisted Living facility and your body will be fed into the GoogleFurnace so the trace elements can be extracted and recycled for use in Google brand products. Your cremains will be taken out and sprinkled in the ocean, err, I mean in the "Google Ocean".
And so the Cycle of Life, err, I mean the "Cycle Of Google" will begin anew. All hail our Google overlords, blessed be thy names!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Yes, nothing is better for humanity than more corporate-owned scientific research.
many of them will return to academia. I had more time off the two years I taught comp sci than I have had total the past twenty-two years in private industry. A 90% cut in your vacation time will wear you down, especially if you were used to having it.
Yes I know they're working on cure for cancer, but I have this sneaking suspicion that these guys are trying to live forever, like Ray Kurzweil.
Of course curing cancer could be just step 1 of their master program.
No, wait. That's stupid.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How so? The research they do is usually corporate-funded.
too much money to waste in fields and places they do not know much about, for unclear motives, to achieve unclear goals, through murky means.
just like usa and other western governments wasting blood and treasure in iraq, afagnistan, syria, libya, etc,etc,, through among other things, invasions, coups, drone killing children, torture, etc etc,, to allegedly promote liberty and democracy, (or more probably to loot resources to keep up the lifestyles of western citizen voters and their debt-ridden wasteful culture of death, catered to by companies like google)
if there is a new thing to be found or invented it will not be due to some government or government like company throwing money at it. see origin of google itself.
No it's not. You read one article about GMO research and now you think you know something.
Bullshit. University research has been corporate-funded for decades.
University research has been corporate-funded for decades.
I don't know what other fields are like, but for biomedical research this is absolutely wrong. I worked for both public and private universities in the US for 15 years and the vast majority of scientists were getting the vast majority of their funding from the NIH, or maybe the NSF, plus a few big private foundations like HHMI. Funding from companies was not uncommon - in fact it paid my salary for a couple of years, thank you tech transfer department* - but for most researchers it was a fraction of whatever the government was giving them. (In the group where I was paid by corporate money, I was the only one, while another dozen people were paid by an NIH grant.)
(* actually, no. Working with companies as an academic can be an incredible pain in the ass and I didn't like our licensing policies anyway. And it certainly did skew our priorities somewhat, which was even more annoying. But we absolutely didn't need the money either.)
The top 15 pharmaceutical companies and the top 10 medical device companies all spend significantly more than $1b per year on R&D. Google is high profile because it's NOT in pharma or medical devices, but adding $1b per year to the overall industrial expenditure on R&D in these areas is not disruptive. It makes an interesting story to imagine that Google is coming in and stealing all the academics away, but that's not reality.
It's worth doing things that aren't immediately applicable and things that are. Often, things that are immediately applicable will turn up new questions for basic research, and basic research leads to applications at some point (sometimes). But in order to really help people, you need both areas.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Google's aim seems to be specifically at things that may have big long term pay-offs. - Some of them probably a decade or more in the future. That's where the really huge stupendous amounts of money lie.
In Strong AI the long term market (20 to 30 years) could easily hit over a trillion dollars a year. And Strong AI isn't like software, it tends towards a natural monopoly with only a few very big players and strong regulation.. Software doesn't generally tend to kill people when things go wrong - Strong AI does.. That actually is likely to be a common selling point, 'Only XXX Corp can build your Strong AI safely!'
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Then we know we are finished.
Ah yes. Take the money from the corporation, have the middle-man skim off the top while doling it out, do the research and then sue all the corporations that use the "publicly funded" research without paying the university directly also.
Yeah, a good thing corporations aren't the only ones doing research and requiring licensing fees.
Is this really Google's doing because none of this seems to be search engine related.
There were news items a few months ago saying some of the Silicon Valley billionaires were planning to fund anti-ageing medical research.
- The medical establishment hasn't been pushing it because the FDA considers ageing to be a normal process, rather than a disease, and so treatments and drugs to retard or reverse it, even if they were amazingly effective, would be unlikely to be something they can bring to market and recover and profit from an investment.
- The Federal Government has a strong financial interest in oldsters dying off, because they're more of a drag on entitlement programs than a source of tax money (and less likely to vote for the current crop of politicians - of either party - than better-indoctrinated and/or less experienced younger people). They've been talking about "bringing the death rate up to meet the birth rate" in order to avoid the bankruptcy of Social Security since at least the early '80s. Obamacare has similar financial issues but has raised the ante, and taken over control of the dispensing of most healthcare. (Some believe it's the end-game for getting rid of the Boomers. Witness the discussion about whether it includes "death panels".) So don't expect a lot of anti-ageing funding from the government.
Medical insurance companies have a similar incentive structure - as has long been noted.
Even the life-extension movement people are not funded well enough to do more than watch the literature for possible age-slowing discoveries and work on better ways to put their members into cryonic suspension when they die (funded mainly by life insurance policies) in the hope of future breakthroughs.
(A real cure for ageing, of course, or even a close approximation, wouldn't produce the bankruptcy scenario. By restoring youth and health it would avoid the need to retire and be supported by ever-increasing medical intervention. The reduction of these costs, and increasing value produced by longer working life, after deducting the costs of the anti-ageing treatments itself, should be big drop in expense. But that's beyond the bureaucratic planning horizon.)
So if Internet Billionaires want any medical research that might extend their lives and those of their employees, friends, associates, the builders and maintainers of the infrastructure that supports them, and perhaps the rest of humanity, they'll have to fund it themselves.
Fortunately, a few of them ARE doing so. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Google had been disruptive across many areas. Maybe.... Fingers crossed.... They actually want to look for cures instead of of the lifelong palliatives we typically get, that provide revenue instead of good health.
Only boring people are ever bored.