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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
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Sunday May 07 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
"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
Good, then add Kurzweil's 2012 appointment to Goog to the list, because thos is exactly what I assumed he'd been hired for.