From Motherboard:
Who's going to live forever? These guys! Via Google
On
Wednesday, Google announced that it is getting in the immortality game,
with the launch of an absurdly ambitious new venture that literally
aims to stop death. It burned through the media, spurred by a TIME cover story. But Google is hardly the first Silicon Valley giant to fight old age.
Tech titans have poured millions into the multibillion
dollar anti-aging industry, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Valley
remains a hotbed for the transhumanist movement, which aims to
fundamentally transform the human condition, using new technologies to
enhance our intellectual, psychological, and physical
capabilities—including our ability to live forever.
So
far, we don’t know much about this new Google company, except that it
is called Calico and will be led by Arthur Levinson, the former CEO of
biotech pioneer Genentech, who is also chairman of the board at Apple.
According to the Google press release, Calico—
an abbreviation for California Life Company—“will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases.”
But in an exclusive TIME magazine interview
that accompanied Wednesday’s announcement, Google CEO Larry Page made
it clear that his ambitions for Calico are far more grandiose. The new
venture is a “moonshot,” Page says, a word he uses to describe Google’s
often outlandish attempts to bring the world into the future.
"Are
people really focused on the right things?" Page told TIME. "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."
In
other words, curing cancer isn’t big enough. In fact, Page suggests
that the ultimate goal of Calico is to cure, or rather “solve,” aging
and death—a quixotic goal even for a company that is building a driverless car and wants to use helium balloons to expand Internet access.
But while Calico may be one of the most most high-profile
and well-funded attempts to stop the aging process, Page and Co. are
hardly the first Silicon Valley dreamers to search for the Fountain of
Youth. Here’s a rundown of Silicon Valley’s recent attempts to find
immortality:
Ellison Medical Foundation: Founded
by billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the fifth-richest person in
the world, the Ellison Medical Foundation doles out more than
$40 million a year for research in the biology of aging, according to
executive director Kevin Lee. The ultimate goal of the Ellison Medical
Foundation is not immortality, Lee said, but to find cures for the
diseases that accompany aging. "It's about remaining healthy for as long
as possible," Lee told me. "I think this is very possible. There's good
reason to remain optimistic."
Ellison,
who is said to be obsessed with youth, age, and science, is perhaps the
most prominent Fountain of Youth seeker in Silicon Valley. "Death has
never made any sense to me," Ellison told his biographer, Mark Wilson.
"How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?
Clearly the reason they're not there is they're off doing something
else... Death makes me very angry. Premature death makes me angrier
still.''
Prior
to creating the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Oracle billionaire
invested in the now-failed biotech firm Aeiveos, which had planned to
study the genetic makeup of centenarians. The company, which barely
survived past its infancy, was created by an early Oracle employee
Robert Bradbury, an Extropian who believed that genetic engineering
could prolong life.
