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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 takyon on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:42PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:42PM (#505826) Journal

    No, there will be no holding off. Curing aging = curing diseases. There is no support for not curing diseases, or at least there won't be until it's too late to be stopped.

    Broken bones and procreation? Obviously, an anti-aging regimen is going to include restoration of bone strength, and probably fertility [newscientist.com]. Although fertility is much easier than anti-aging. The signs are very clear: you can create a baby from scratch. You know, literally scratching a few skin cells and using DNA to create synthetic embryos, which can be developed in artificial wombs.

    Fertile Mouse Eggs Created Using Stem Cells [soylentnews.org]
    Mice Created from Artificially Developed Embryos [soylentnews.org]
    Book-Sized Device Can Replicate a Woman's Reproductive Cycle [soylentnews.org]
    Fetal Lambs Grown for 4 Weeks in Artificial Womb [soylentnews.org]

    Any effects of anti-aging on overpopulation will take at least 50 years to kick in from today, including the time it takes to develop them, disseminate them widely, and then have people living a couple more decades than usual. Because anti-aging is preventative/regenerative health care, it will have a massive impact on entitlements like Medicare. No more expensive end-of-life care, and less hospital visits. That necessitates a cure for cancer, which is linked to anti-aging anyway (since part of aging is the accumulation of DNA mutations, and one anti-aging solution is nanobots, which would be ideal for destroying cancer cells).

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