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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 Runaway1956 on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:16PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:16PM (#505810) Journal

    That is rather insightful - future population pressures will drive us to accept risks that we won't accept today.

    The question then, is how much damage we do to Earth's environment, before those pressures drive us out? A number of science fiction stories have asked that question, and offered as many answers. Ideally, I say we do no more harm to the earth - we bail now, while it still looks like a choice. Let's preserve what is here. That way, future generations can come back to visit. Future generations can come back for things that will be useful "out there". (Primarily, bio-material - maybe a colony's seeds have degraded, mutated, or whatever, so they can come back to our seed bank, and purchase some seeds.)

    IMO, we need to have been moving more than 30 years ago. The exploratory robot missions that we are doing today should have been started immediately after putting a man on the moon. We've been frozen with indecision for decades now. Among other things, we allowed ourselves to be distracted by that space plane, which really didn't give us our money's worth. I hated the idea of the shuttle when it was first floated, because congress and NASA made it clear that it was an "either/or" proposition. We either continue exploring, or we settle into near earth orbit to run experiments. All the while, the shuttles should have been a mere side show in the space exploration program.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:27PM (#505822)

    The question then, is how much damage we do to Earth's environment, before those pressures drive us out?

    Runaway, you silly goose, you're a conservative! You should know better. It sounds like you've got hating the gays down in other posts. Now repeat after me. "Humans can't change the environment."

  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:47PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:47PM (#506033) Homepage

    " ...future population pressures will drive us to accept risks that we won't accept today. "

    Which will likely be some combination of war, eugenics, and genocide; if things really get that bad. As drastic as that is, it's still the path of least resistance to addressing overpopulation. Westerners are pretty good at self-regulation, but there are certain demographics who are so reckless they're 8-kids deep born straight into regions already defined by famine and violence.