Google seeks the fountain of youth
By Charlie Osborne | September 19, 2013, 1:39 AM PDT
Some of the best minds of my generation will eventually be destroyed by aging -- but not if Google can help it. Can the world's greatest information indexer really solve humanity's most universal problem?|- Aly Windsor, News Editor
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Think Google, think search engine, autonomous vehicles, Android and offices complete with gourmet food and slides. You don’t immediately associate the tech firm with the ageing process.
However, according to the Associated Press, this is exactly where Google is now funding research. A new company, dubbed Calico, is being financed by Google to research ways to slow the ageing process.
Calico will be run by former Google board member Arthur Levinson, who resigned from the firm’s board four years ago and is also the ex-CEO of biotechnology pioneer Genentech. Levinson will remain a chairman of both firms while he runs Calico.
There are few details beyond the scope of the company — which will focus on health, well-being, ageing and associated diseases — and Google has not disclosed how much money will be poured into Calico. Google CEO Larry Page commented on his Google+ profile:
“As we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses. And please remember that new investments like this are very small by comparison to our core business.”
Via: Associated Press
Image credit: Flickr
********************************************We Might Not Want Our Life Extended
What's the point of living longer if we don't live better?
European politics offers an illustration of why some people are uneasy about initiatives that seek to slow or even stop aging. At a 2010 meeting in Russia between the country’s then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi, at that time Italy’s premier, the two men were overheard discussing life-extension technologies. Berlusconi told Putin he planned to fund an institute that like Google’s Calico would investigate ways to lengthen the human span. “So we’re going to live to 120?” asked Putin, eagerly. “It seems so, yes,” replied Berlusconi. “But that would be an average age. I’m told leaders will have an even longer life.”
Since I included that vignette in my 2011 book Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly, both men have demonstrated a fervent interest in leadership extension too. Putin, 60, exchanged the Prime Ministership for a third term as President and 76-year-old Berlusconi is fighting his expulsion from the Italian senate despite his conviction for tax fraud. It’s hard to imagine that either man, if granted extra decades of life, would choose to spend those years in quiet retirement./.../
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