DaFreak
Legacy Member
De oprichters van Google, Larry Page en Sergey Brin, maken er geen geheim van dat ze een transhumanistische toekomst als droom voor ogen hebben. 5 jaar geleden hielpen ze de singularity universiteit uit de grond te stampen, nog niet zo lang geleden hebben ze Mr singularity, Ray Kurzweil himself, aangeworven als director of engineering en onlangs haalde Brin nog het nieuws toen hij onthuld werd als de financial backer van de eerste in het labo gekweekte hamburger. Van het ontwikkelen van geavanceerde AI tot quantum computing en wearable computing (glass), van autonome wagens tot robotische missies naar de maan, van duurzame energie tot het uitrollen van fiber optics en ballon aangedreven wi-fi netwerken, ... het moge duidelijk zijn. Google is tegenwoordig heel wat meer dan enkel search & android. Vanaf vandaag heeft google ook iets met biotechnologie. Ze laten weten dat ze een nieuw bedrijf uit de grond gestampt hebben, Calico, dat zich zal richten op het bestrijden van verouderen.
Jawel, Google gaat de strijd aan met de dood.
Time Cover
Artikel; Calico: Google's New Project to Solve Death | TIME.com
some juicy bits;
"The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is planning to launch Calico, a new firm that will attempt to solve some of health care‘s most vexing problems. One of the independent venture’s major initiatives will be significantly expanding human lifespan. Arthur Levinson, the former chief of biotech pioneer Genentech, is an investor in Calico and will serve as its CEO."
"Google is announcing Calico in a Google+ post Wednesday. Details of the company’s funding and employee head count were not available as of press time."
Why would Google be able to get traction on aging when huge pharmaceutical companies haven’t? Page himself doesn’t oversell his knowledge of the industry. “I don’t have as much personal expertise in the technology,” he admits. “I have some knowledge of it, just being in Silicon Valley.” Google has invested in gene-sequencing company 23andMe, a startup co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Brin’s wife. And in February, Levinson and Brin joined Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner in organizing the $33 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, to “recognize excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.”
It’s a lot easier to take Google’s venture seriously if you live under the invisible dome over Silicon Valley, home to a worldview whereby, broadly speaking, there is no problem that can’t be addressed by the application of liberal amounts of technology and everything is solvable if you reduce it to data and then throw enough processing power at it.
The twist is that the technophiles are right, at least up to a point. Medicine is well on its way to becoming an information science: doctors and researchers are now able to harvest and mine massive quantities of data from patients. And Google is very, very good with large data sets. While the company is holding its cards about Calico close to the vest, expect it to use its core data-handling skills to shed new light on familiar age-related maladies. Sources close to the project suggest it will start small and focus entirely on researching new technologies. When will that lead to something Google might actually sell? It’s anybody’s guess.
What’s certain is that looking at medical problems through the lens of data and statistics, rather than simply attempting to bring drugs to market, can produce startlingly counterintuitive opinions. “Are people really focused on the right things?” Page muses. “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.” Page, in other words, is a man for whom solving — not curing — cancer may not be a big enough task.
Respons van Aubrey De Grey, een biogerontoloog onder andere bekend voor zijn SENS aanvalsplan & de Methuselah Mouse prize), die al decennia probeert om ouderdom bestrijding op de agenda te krijgen; Finally, the War on Aging Has Truly Begun
To paraphrase Churchill’s words following the Second Battle of El Alamein: Google‘s announcement about their new venture to extend human life, Calico, is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
"I won’t go so far as to say that my crusading job is done, but for sure it just got a whole lot easier."
Jawel, Google gaat de strijd aan met de dood.
Time Cover
Artikel; Calico: Google's New Project to Solve Death | TIME.com
some juicy bits;
"The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is planning to launch Calico, a new firm that will attempt to solve some of health care‘s most vexing problems. One of the independent venture’s major initiatives will be significantly expanding human lifespan. Arthur Levinson, the former chief of biotech pioneer Genentech, is an investor in Calico and will serve as its CEO."
"Google is announcing Calico in a Google+ post Wednesday. Details of the company’s funding and employee head count were not available as of press time."
Why would Google be able to get traction on aging when huge pharmaceutical companies haven’t? Page himself doesn’t oversell his knowledge of the industry. “I don’t have as much personal expertise in the technology,” he admits. “I have some knowledge of it, just being in Silicon Valley.” Google has invested in gene-sequencing company 23andMe, a startup co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Brin’s wife. And in February, Levinson and Brin joined Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner in organizing the $33 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, to “recognize excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.”
It’s a lot easier to take Google’s venture seriously if you live under the invisible dome over Silicon Valley, home to a worldview whereby, broadly speaking, there is no problem that can’t be addressed by the application of liberal amounts of technology and everything is solvable if you reduce it to data and then throw enough processing power at it.
The twist is that the technophiles are right, at least up to a point. Medicine is well on its way to becoming an information science: doctors and researchers are now able to harvest and mine massive quantities of data from patients. And Google is very, very good with large data sets. While the company is holding its cards about Calico close to the vest, expect it to use its core data-handling skills to shed new light on familiar age-related maladies. Sources close to the project suggest it will start small and focus entirely on researching new technologies. When will that lead to something Google might actually sell? It’s anybody’s guess.
What’s certain is that looking at medical problems through the lens of data and statistics, rather than simply attempting to bring drugs to market, can produce startlingly counterintuitive opinions. “Are people really focused on the right things?” Page muses. “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.” Page, in other words, is a man for whom solving — not curing — cancer may not be a big enough task.
Respons van Aubrey De Grey, een biogerontoloog onder andere bekend voor zijn SENS aanvalsplan & de Methuselah Mouse prize), die al decennia probeert om ouderdom bestrijding op de agenda te krijgen; Finally, the War on Aging Has Truly Begun
To paraphrase Churchill’s words following the Second Battle of El Alamein: Google‘s announcement about their new venture to extend human life, Calico, is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
"I won’t go so far as to say that my crusading job is done, but for sure it just got a whole lot easier."
