The sad truth is that, if everyone on the Forbes 400 list simultaneously (and tragically) got Cancer, or Parkinsons (or any given disease for that matter), the world would probably be well on its way to finding a cure for these illnesses, thanks to the enormous wealth that would be incentivized to back those efforts.
Finding a cure for an intractable disease requires time, enormous amounts of human and financial capital, cooperation and research — and at least a few public-private partnerships. It’s costly, and it’s messy. This is why Calico, Google’s newest mad science project, is potentially so exciting.
In fact, Calico could represent the company’s largest healthcare initiative since Google Healthsprinted its way into obscurity. Of course, Google is a different company today than it was in 2008 (when it launched Google Health) and so are we. Our habits have have changed: Today, 20 percent of smartphone users have downloaded at least one health app and 60 percent of adults now look for health information online.
Led by former Genentech CEO and current Apple Chairman, Arthur D. Levinson, Calico has big plans in healthcare — at least over the long term. From what we’ve heard thus far, the new project will leverage Google’s massive cloud and data centers to help facilitate research on disease and aging, mine its trove of data for insight into their origins.
Plus, thanks to its investment in 23andMe, Google already has access to a fast-growing genomic database, which could come in handy as it begins to focus on, in its words, “health and well-being — in particular the challenge of aging” and dive into the science, genetics and biochemistry behind longevity and disease.
In an interview with TIME Magazine, Google CEO Larry Page implied that dramatically extending human life is one of Calico’s main goals; not making people immortal per se, but, according to a source familiar with the project, increasing the lifespan of people born 20 years ago by as much as 100 years.
“Are people really focused on the right things?” Page muses in the interview. “One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world, but when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.”
While his delivery is a bit confusing, Page’s thesis seems to be an optimistic one. While curing cancer has always seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, the goal is more within reach than many believe, if only someone would just put their mind to it — he seems to say. Yes, Larry Page is brilliant, but his message also seems to imply that diseases (and their cures) are reducible — that all of the world’s problems could be cured if we just had some snappier algorithms.
Really, it almost seems more of a reflection of how enormous many-headed-beast that is Google has become, and a testament to its resources and the type of talent it’s able to attract — rather than pure, unbridled hubris. It’s as if they’re saying: “Hi, welcome to Google! Today, we’re going to turn your eyeglasses into a computer, tomorrow we’ll develop self-driving cars, the day after that, we’ll cure cancer and increase the average human lifespan by 100 years. Oh, and by the way, we’re still trying to organize all of the world’s information and make it easily searchable!!” N.B.D., everybody, N.B.D.
Interestingly, Calico doesn’t seem to be a Google company per se, more of an investment in a new company that will be affiliated with Google and become an extension of the company’s mad science lab, Google X. “Don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses,” Page warned readers on Google+, Google’s social network. [Yes, let's not forget that Google also has a social network. It's like Facebook except no one uses it!] “Please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.” Of course, with a market cap approaching $300 billion, Google could make a $1 billion investment in Calico and it would still be a very small investment “by comparison to its core business.”
Source : TechCrunch
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