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posted by n1 on Sunday May 07 2017, @09:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the olay-regenerist dept.

In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Google vs. Death about Calico, a then-new Google-run health venture focused on understanding aging — and how to beat it. "We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done," Google CEO Larry Page told Time.

But how exactly would Calico help humans live longer, healthier lives? How would it invest its vast $1.5 billion pool of money? Beyond sharing the company's ambitious mission — to better understand the biology of aging and treat aging as a disease — Page was vague.

I recently started poking around in Silicon Valley and talking to researchers who study aging and mortality, and discovered that four years after its launch, we still don't know what Calico is doing.

I asked everyone I could about Calico — and quickly learned that it's an impenetrable fortress. Among the little more than a dozen press releases Calico has put out, there were only broad descriptions of collaborations with outside labs and pharmaceutical companies — most of them focused on that overwhelmingly vague mission of researching aging and associated diseases. The media contacts there didn't so much as respond to multiple requests for interviews.

People who work at Calico, Calico's outside collaborators, and even folks who were no longer with the company, stonewalled me.

We should pause for a moment to note how strange this is. One of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world has taken an interest in aging research, with about as much funding as NIH's entire budget for aging research, yet it's remarkably opaque.

[...]

[David] Botstein [the Calico Chief Scientific Officer] says a "best case" scenario is that Calico will have something profound to offer the world in 10 years. That time line explains why the company declines media interviews. "There will be nothing to say for a very long time, except for some incremental scientific things. That is the problem."

But avoiding media hype does not require secrecy among scientific colleagues. If Calico's scientists were truly interested in pushing the boundaries of science, they might think about using some of the best practices that have been developed to that end: transparency, data sharing, and coordinating with other researchers so they don't go down redundant and wasteful paths.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:14AM (7 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:14AM (#505790) Journal

    As I have said before, being someone who is 2400 years old, what is up with this? All these tech robber barons, once they make mega-shitloads of money, immediately start funding research on not dying. Why? Do they not realize what it is like to live for millennia, let alone be immortal? And of course, Google is not the worst. Look into Peter Thiel's investments, and interest in "young blood" vampirism. And for those of you old enough to remember, Rockefeller was into the first milk of new mothers, colostrum, in an attempt to cheat death. But science? Medical research? I suggest everyone re-watch Jupiter Rising again.

    discovered that four years after its launch, we still don't know what Calico is doing.

    Don't worry, they probably don't, either.

    There is an old Taoist story. Some Taoist alchemists but cinnabar into a furnace, and produced the Elixir of Immortality! Silvery liquid metal! They drank it, and all promptly died. Chuangzi's comment was, "Some Elixir of Immortality!" Of course, this was the same therapy that was tried on Huang-di, the First, and Last, Emperor of the Ch'in Dynasty. If only the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley should be so lucky.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:34PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:34PM (#505824)

    I suggest everyone re-watch Jupiter Rising again.

    Oh dear god no! I've always known you had a cruel streak, but isn't that a bit much???

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:39PM (#505863)

      Oh dear god no! I've always known you had a cruel streak, but isn't that a bit much???
      The movie suffered from the same problem as their last few movies. They need a good editor willing to chop out 30-40 mins of boring stuff. There is good stuff in there.

      Someone once asked an editor of horror films how they could stand working on such scary stuff. She said 'its not really scary until *I* am done with it'. Basically she made it a better movie usually. Movies can die on the editing floor. See Star Wars 1-3.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 07 2017, @02:10PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 07 2017, @02:10PM (#505836) Journal

    Silicon Valley Vampires (SVVs) can do whatever they want with their money. If people have a problem with that, they should vote for representatives that don't lower taxes on the rich. Unfortunately, 8 Republican seats are up for grabs in 2018 [wikipedia.org], while 23 Democratic seats and 2 Democratic-leaning independents are up. So in the short term, SVVs will experience lower taxes and less regulations until at least 2021.

    Do they not realize what it is like to live for millennia, let alone be immortal?

    If life is suffering, why not suffer forever?

    There is hope for immortals. It's called suicide. But philosophers should not get to make that choice for people.

    Don't worry, they probably don't, either.

    Aubrey de Grey called Google/Calico's bluff years ago [technologyreview.com]. We'll know they are serious once they hire him. But it is fine if they are in no hurry to produce results and are just conducting basic research, although Google divisions without a useful product don't tend to last very long.

    Young blood infusions are just another example of rich early adopters jumping on a scam backed by incomplete science [technologyreview.com]. This should be viewed as a positive, since it takes money away from the overendowmented rich and gives it to people more likely to invest or spend it. Real anti-aging therapies will likely use reprogrammed cells or nanobots, not the blood of the innocents (who can conveniently be used as dried husk sex slaves by the elites).

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)

      by SunTzuWarmaster (3971) on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:44PM (#505866)
      Obviously this entire article is speculation, and the comments section is just as good! That said, I think that you hit it here:
      "But it is fine if they are in no hurry to produce results and are just conducting basic research, although Google divisions without a useful product don't tend to last very long."

      They aren't a Google division (specifically a venture division with less pressure). The anti-aging research is infantile at best, so they are probably conducting basic research. They likely feel no pressure to publish their basic research (business edge) results. Sharing/Reporting will only get 1) attention, and 2) debate, and will take their scientists off the work. The patent system for biology research is garbage (and not particularly defendable). It seems real possible that they simply decided to lock everything up behind NDAs until they had a product, or at least something to sell to others.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:51PM (#505978)

        Good, then add Kurzweil's 2012 appointment to Goog to the list, because thos is exactly what I assumed he'd been hired for.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday May 07 2017, @06:03PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Sunday May 07 2017, @06:03PM (#505932)

    Why do they want to become immortal? Because it takes a really long time to insult the universe, one person at a time, in alphabetical order!

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:54PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 07 2017, @07:54PM (#505962)

    Do they not realize what it is like to live for millennia, let alone be immortal?

    In the old days education at least partially existed to give royalty something interesting to think about for the rest of their lives.

    So the old trope of living forever was pro- higher- education-al propaganda.

    Everyone knows the village idiot bubba type who retired at 65 and was dead at 65.1 because he was dead mentally around age 12 or so, therefore with nothing better to do he held down the couch and did boredom eating (drinking) and didn't make it more than a month.

    Like a lot of people I have the personality profile and academic interests to quite well entertained if I lived for millennia.