
Google is developing cancer and heart attack detector - sxp
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29802581
======
steven
I had the opportunity to speak to the head of this project Andrew Conrad at
length.

[https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-
tric...](https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-
tricorder-12e1822e5e6a) What struck me was his optimism that this was really
going to happen. Usually researchers are ultra cautious about going out on a
limb like that (Yes, he said there was much to do, but read the interview to
get his tone.) I think that comes from working at a place like Google X that
encourages the big reach.

~~~
JoeH
I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor less than a year ago. It is a tumor
that has been growing inside me for at least 5 years. Had it been correctly
detected/diagnosed 5 years ago, it would have been an operable tumor with a
high chance of a cure rate. Unfortunately, now that tumor is currently non-
operable.

Current cancer screening guidelines aren't sufficient and in almost all cases
they utterly fail in the early detection of cancers for people under the age
of 50.

I applaud anyone working towards a better method for early detection!

~~~
kendalk
I am so sorry to hear that! My mother, also, was found with a tumor that we
didn't know about for a long time. She fought as long as she could. She never
gave up hope.

Doctors don't know everything. There are ways to fight, even natural ones.
Fighting with anything is better than giving up. Hope is very powerful. Don't
give up. Keep fighting.

Best wishes to you from one who has walked this road with another.

------
swamp40
Google: "We want to scan your body with our amazing new technology and
possibly add 20 years to your life!"

Haters: "No thanks, _way_ too intrusive. I don't want you tracking me/selling
my data/showing me ads."

~~~
rryan
Seriously, why would I let an advertising company _in my body_?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _an advertising company_

[http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-
intelligen...](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-
intelligence/)

> Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only
> focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google's
> brilliant cofounder, who became the company's CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still
> don't get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free?
> Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that
> predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was
> before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income,
> long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid
> user of its search site who thought it would not last long.

> But Page's reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we're really making an AI.”

~~~
throwaway7808
Most likely you and your kids are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines
just in a few decades.

~~~
gtremper
I'm more worried about intelligent humans

~~~
notduncansmith
I worry more about the other side of the bell curve.

------
swartkrans
The heart attack detector seems great, but I wonder about the cancer detector.
It may lead to a high number of false positives resulting in unnecessary
exposures to CT scans, which because it uses radiation can actually lead to
cancer, and unnecessary medical procedures and expenses, and unnecessary
anxiety. If they get the false positives down it would be very beneficial of
course.

~~~
natrius
Seems like a straightforward optimization problem. Only alert someone if the
expected probability of disease is high enough to be worth the risks of
radiation and unnecessary procedures.

~~~
zwieback
Many tests top out at 50% or less and even if the specificity is high you
can't necessarily say whether you have a bad form of the disease or not.
That's the problem with PSA testing for prostate cancer.

------
Lambdanaut
I'm not worried about an "advertising agency" handling this project at all.
Google is hardly just an ads agency anymore. They're multi-faceted. Maybe we
should be concerned that they're(successfully) reaching their hands into just
about every problem domain, but so far it's been good news for the consumer
and they haven't done anything that I'm aware of to warrant them to be
untrustworthy.

That being said. Watch your diet and carb intake. Preventative measures are
better than having to fix the disease at the last minute.

------
bradbeattie
I would hope they investigate whether the ingestion of "disease-detecting
nanoparticles" increases one's risk of cancer.

~~~
jimrandomh
These aren't amateurs.

~~~
sdrothrock
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotchgard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotchgard)

This product was not made by amateurs and was on the market for about 30
years. Its key component was perfluorooctanesulfonamide, a precursor to
perfluorooctane sulfonate, which lingers in the human body for five and a half
years and can cause developmental delays, cancer, immune disorders, and all
kinds of other things.

Amateurs can exercise due diligence and professionals can miss things.

------
EZ-E
Why do Apple, Google and major IT companies seem so much interested by our
health suddenly ? What are they planning to do with the data ? Just selling it
? (life insurance companies ?)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _Why do Apple, Google and major IT companies seem so much interested by our
> health suddenly ?_

I have come to the conclusion that some of the tech visionaries recently are
actually motivated, on the bottom-most level, by doing Good - in the old-
fashioned moral sense.

As far as I can tell, Elon Musk is firmly in this category. Recently I've
started to believe that Larry Page and Sergey Brin also belong here. Sure,
they have companies and profits and board meetings to worry about, and of
course they don't mind having their egos pampered a bit, but their prime
motivator appears to be improving the future of humanity on a large scale.

Not everyone is like that, however. In fact, the list is very, very short. I'm
only willing to put these three names on it, so far. Most of the others are
energized by more mundane reasons, and of course there's also a minority of
plain old villains out there.

~~~
NoodleIncident
You've named three unbelievably wealthy people who you believe are motivated
to Do Good. Which is Iron Man? Which is Batman? And more terrifyingly, which
is Ozymandius?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
I think we're clear (or at least the press is) on who is Iron Man in this
bunch.

Batman is still pretty cool, in my book. I've been around the block, and I've
learned that to ask 100% kink-free moral perfection from human beings is a
fool's errand. Stomp a few people's faces for the eventual greater good is
fine, if you don't do it too much. Not sure if I could find an equivalent in
real life, though. Maybe Bill Gates? No, he's more like the ruthless merchant
turned philantropist.

Ozymandias is some famous media moguls, along with a bunch of finance tycoons
for good measure. It's a far more popular archetype.

------
sk2code
Including my mom in the last 10 years I've lost 4 female members of family to
cancer. This product is revolutionary no doubt and I am very excited about it.
I believe Google will face an uphill task as there are lots of things to
explain to the consumer before taking this full stream.

1\. Will these nano particles stay in my blood stream forever or do I have to
inject them in my body periodically. What are its side effects?

2\. The wristband on my hand communicating with these nano particles in
someway connects back to the Google's network and now along with my emails and
pics Google is tracking my health and my DNA. I mean I can turn off my phone
and not use my email but I can't turn off my body. When combined with the DNA
this project has the potential to provide an RFID to each and every human
being.

Ignore my ignorance I am not the expert here just curious about all these
possibilities.

------
millstone
This sounds great and I hope they're successful.

That said, what's the point of pre-announcing stuff like this, when it's at
such an early stage? Is it just goodwill?

~~~
munificent
From this article[1]:

    
    
        There’s still a million crazy things that happen with 
        people, and there’s a long journey to put medicines into
        people, and it has to be done in the open because we’re
        going to do experiments— people will be wearing these
        devices at our Baseline Study.
    

And:

    
    
        Yeah. That’s part of the reason we had to talk about this.
        There’s a pretty substantial body of patents that describe
        what we’re talking about in great detail that will be
        publicly noticeable in the next month or so.
    

[1]: [https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-
tric...](https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-
tricorder-12e1822e5e6a)

------
6stringmerc
Honest and serious question:

Will this compete or compliment the notion that using canines in the cancer /
disease detection process is an avenue for further study?

Re:

[http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/training-dogs-to-
sn...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/training-dogs-to-sniff-out-
cancer/)

~~~
crpatino
Most likely compete. Google excels at organizing information by means of
symbolic processing/manipulation. Dog "know-how" is opaque enough to mix well
with existing expertise.

Unless they go meta and get in the dog training business, effectively using
dogs as black box components in their wider system.

------
zaroth
I imagine "killer app" is no longer the understatement when your next wearable
actually actively monitors your health like this. I think the privacy concerns
can be worked out, and they shouldn't slow down the research.

Seeing the headline, I thought it would be an article monitoring passive
signals to calculate risk scores, so I was really happy to see biochemistry. I
think Google pouring funds into this kind of research will lead to some
awesome advancements. It's easy to imagine a recurring revenue stream from a
device like this which adds years to your lifespan. Owning a device like that
actually reduces the cost of your life/disability insurance because anything
that does go wrong gets discovered earlier with better outcomes. Actually, you
could pay for the device out of those savings alone.

It is amazing to think what the feature comparison chart for wearables in the
next decade will look like.

------
loopasam
Nano-bubbles and particles have been used since a long time to diagnose
diseases and enhance the quality of ultrasound analysis (contrast agents). You
can also link an antibody on their surface to target them against a particular
protein or reveal a zone of interest (e.g. a tumor revealed by a specific
biomarker). Nano-bubbles are even use to destroy adjacent tissue on purpose
(sonoporation).

Usually such particles are constructed via a mix of lipids and have a very
short life time in the blood stream. I wonder how they're going to keep them
alive in the blood stream for what seems to be a very long time and their
design regarding toxicity.

------
Shivetya
Reading the story all I can think of is the possibilities. Suspend the
particles into and disperse with aerosol in public places and then scan for
indicators you want as they walk through or by detectors. You could set it all
up to report to individuals anonymously, but the idea of what a future of
health care might be should include a system which requires no action on the
patients.

The privacy concerns could be immense or moot, but many would trade for the
convenience

------
taf2
Sounds pretty elaborate - perhaps if we could just work on a lower cost almost
do it yourself access to an MRI or ultrasound detection as well as many other
troubles in the body could be detected... But this is health care 7 billion
opinions very few solutions beyond reducing pain and cutting stuff

------
melling
That would pretty much cover the rest of the population, as far as getting
people to wear a smart watch.

------
julius
Specially trained dogs are able to sniff out stuff like cancerous cells or if
a kid needs his insuline.

Always wondered why we cannot build an artificial nose like that. Does anyone
have any insights into this topic?

~~~
dnautics
the cancer sniffing dog thing appears to be a case of Clever Hans

~~~
julius
Did some quick googling. Seems like research so far supports the claim.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_cancer_detection)

Is there any research, with different results, missing from the Wikipedia
page?

------
brianstorms
World's largest advertising company developing cancer and heart attack
detector. Think of the great AdSense and AdWords lead generation opportunities
coming. It's like printing money.

~~~
vertex-four
They've generally been quite good at refusing to let advertisers target on
sensitive subjects. It's probably a legal minefield in most developed
countries, and it'd be a PR nightmare if there were any sort of adverse
effects.

"We won’t associate with an individual’s cookie any audiences considered
sensitive, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health,
certain financial information, and others."[0]

[0]
[https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497941?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497941?hl=en)

------
cpuguy83
Hmm... Anyone seen the show "Continuum"? You should. It's on Netflix. And
would instantly raise some red flags for this.

------
reality_czech
I read this as "cancer and heart attack deflector," and it seemed a lot more
awesome than it really is. Oh well.

------
brightdream
Google is uniquely positioned with the amount of data it has to uncover strong
correlations between behavior and disease.

------
malthaus
why are they doing that - just because they can and it's a great headline?

if i were a google shareholder i'd rather have them return excess money than
go on those pet / "greenwashing" projects

~~~
zaroth
They say this is how they are going to run the business in the prospectus.
They are fully entitled to directing their own R&D efforts.

------
lovemenot
Marketing, competition, new features, bugs, expoits, evolution. These things
could go viral. Literally. A hard robots.txt equivalent cellular protocol
might be needed to protect body parts from the gaze of Grey Google.

------
quietriot
Google is a developing cancer and heart attack...

------
ripb
I find the idea of potentially handing Google, a firm whose core model is
selling ads and generalized user data, the details of my biochemical makeup
quite troubling.

~~~
arnarbi
Honest question: Why?

~~~
ripb
>Honest question: Why?

Why should an advertising company get access to this data in the first place?
What do they intend on doing with it?

Selling us adverts based on a combination of our biochemical data, or the
state of our health, coupled with our search terms that might indicate we have
concern over one area or another?

Being able to help the medical sales industry target us more efficiently? As
in "X user has Y indicators in their health data, therefore they would be a
prudent market to advertise Z to"?

~~~
arnarbi
Nobody is saying they _should_. The data is yours, and if you don't get any
value from giving access to it, then don't.

My question was: Assuming you get something in return (better health, or
longer life, for example), what are the factors you are weighing against it?

Note in particular that I'm not saying there aren't any. I'm just challenging
the knee-jerk statement of "my body's bio-chemical data is super private and
sensitive so nothing in the world can be worth giving access to it", without
any actual argument for it.

------
darkstar999
Google is developing cancer

[long inhale]

and heart attack detector

