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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 bzipitidoo on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:10PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday May 07 2017, @01:10PM (#505818) Journal

    Overpopulation is a very old problem that Space isn't big enough to free life from. If it is not possible to travel ever increasing distances in the same amount of time, which seems highly likely, then life can always overfill all the space it can reach. Population can double over a fixed period of time, while the amount of 3D space that can be reached in that same time can only grow by the volume of a sphere, which is much, much less. How did life deal with overpopulation? The destructive routes of depleting all available resources and then collapsing, helplessly succumbing to starvation, or starting a war, seem not the best strategies to assure the survival of a species. Too easy for the collapse to be so ruinous that the species never recovers, and goes extinct. Or doom could have been assured just before the collapse, by literally "eating your seed corn" out of desperation. Observing how life handles it, one sees all kinds of self-regulating behavior. In many animals, the females will not produce offspring if conditions do not look favorable. For many but not all animals, there is of course the external restraint, predation.

    But back to the main point. I agree that we do not appreciate what it would mean to "cure" aging. Let's suppose this is the most powerful possible cure which extends one's best years indefinitely, and not a mere extension of one's worst twilight years. I'd love to be able to personally celebrate my 200th birthday as physically fit as a 20 year old, no back ache, graying and thining hairs, failing eyesight, etc. But my 1000th birthday? Or my 10,000th? Seems very likely we would discover that such a cure, if possible, is a worse disease. Our oldest members, who have had the most time to amass power and wealth, might be able to maintain a tyrannically unchanging, static society. It could even bring evolution, for ourselves, to an end, or at least a stop for so long as the oldest can hang on.

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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:07PM

    by deimtee (3272) on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:07PM (#505966) Journal

    Our oldest members, who have had the most time to amass power and wealth, might be able to maintain a tyrannically unchanging, static society. It could even bring evolution, for ourselves, to an end, or at least a stop for so long as the oldest can hang on.

    I don't think it would work out like that. The difference in subtlety, strategy, and experience between a smart 20 year old and a smart 50 or 60 year old is huge, leading to the current old-men-run-the-world state. The difference between an 860 year old and a 900 year old is likely to be tiny.

    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.