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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 VLM on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:09PM
I'm not opposed to longevity
Note that they're talking about anti-aging, so people live better lives. Then other folk (not just you) mis-interpret that as living longer which in 2017 means living cruddier more expensive more painful lives (WRT your depends and IV comments). Which is in direct contradiction to the original "anti-aging" claim.
I'm told I have young looking skin because I haven't spend decades suntanning. An argument of "why would I want to live to my current age suffering thru leathery skin" is not much of an argument to me because I have the skin of a teenage girl. Hanging up in my closet right over there. Boy did she fight but I acquired it in the end. Just kidding. But not kidding about having young person skin. Because I don't tan. People my age are supposed to start developing bad skin but not me, I got no F to give about that.
Its interesting just a couple weeks after Easter to contemplate looking at old people at church. There's folks in their 80s who look younger than folks in their 50s. Usually its not random. The people who don't smoke usually don't have emphysema starting in their 40s, the folks who eat better food seem to keep under 400 pounds a lot easier, etc.
The other snarky way to read Google's efforts is Fing around on the internet for a total of 5 years per lifetime means cutting that crap out as much as possible by more intelligent searching or just not using G+ or whatever is basically giving you extra years of quality life.