
Update on Google’s Secretive Startup Calico Labs - apsec112
http://longevityfacts.com/update-googles-secretive-start-calico-labs/
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throwaway8184
Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. Organizationally,
Calico seems to be built in the exact opposite way from the Manhattan Project.

Imagine you were building the first fission bomb, but doing it the Calico way
(which is the way most science is done these days). You'd say: we need
enormous progress in a wide variety of very distinct fields: nuclear physics,
isotope chemistry, metallurgy, high-speed photography...

So you'd ask PIs in all these fields to send you grant proposals related to
the problem of building an atom bomb. They would take their existing grant
proposal template, rewrite it to talk about atom bombs, and send it in. You
would send them money. They would deliver progress reports.

What would happen? Probably, you'd build an atom bomb. The first test would be
in 1986, after 45 years and 500 billion dollars. It would cause major damage
to three creosote plants and severely startle a jackrabbit.

Next, imagine Calico's funders said: we will take this same amount of money,
and pour it into a single problem -- rejuvenating a dog. Much like Manhattan's
single product deliverable.

Moreover, we will not hire existing players to repaper their existing lines of
research. We will hire the best new PhDs and tell them to do whatever want to
do, so long as it represents one piece of a reasonable strategy for, or step
toward, an realistic engineering procedure for rejuvenating dogs. (Or at least
mice, if long-lived animals are too hard a first step.)

In this kind of organization -- ie, a hierarchical company-shaped structure
with a company-shaped goal, delivering a product -- the standards of relevance
and collaboration will be much, much higher. Los Alamos hired the best people
in the world, but no one took their existing research and tried to shoehorn it
into the Manhattan Project.

No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. We
actually put a lot of money into science and technology, and the personnel are
just as talented as ever. Every PI is an Oppenheimer. But there is no General
Groves.

~~~
neves
A little difference is that during the Manhattan project you had the Humanity
greatest minds unemployed and relocating to the USA.

~~~
idlewords
Another difference is that atomic fission is a dozen or two orders of
magnitude simpler than biology.

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ggm
If I was a company which had placed map()/reduce() at the core of my working
logic, and I had emerging machine learning systems (hate the words, but lets
go with it) which demonstrated algorithmic ability to tune and select patterns
in "things" I would probably say pre- in-vivo drug analysis was a tractable
problem: If protein folding is a "thing" then there are probably other
"things" about drugs which are tractable to widespread, large scale compute
farm logic, which is in the end, about map()/reduce() and the smarts.

In other words, what Calico is doing, is perhaps more 'boring' than people
_want_ , but more applicable to what it _has_ -a (french metric) tonne of
money, and specific computer science based smarts at scale.

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hossbeast
Why do they even bother putting this out? There is zero information content
with respect to what they are actually doing. I still have no idea what they
are doing.

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atomical
Is type 2 diabetes really a disease of aging? I don't know any older Americans
that have developed type 2 diabetes.

I guess downvoting a question is cool now.

~~~
fjsolwmv
The literal name of the disease is "adult onset diabetes"

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kvonhorn
This week in Hacker News, people in the tech industry are worried about age
discrimination once they hit 40 or even 30. Here, Calico is working to extend
life spans to a theoretical upper limit of 500.

Why would I want to live to be 500 if I'm going to have difficulty finding a
job after 30 or 40? How the hell am I going to afford rent when I'm 200 and
unemployable?

~~~
shard
You are not the target market. The funders want to live forever, and they
don't have to worry about money. You are just collateral benefit if this
works.

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jbergens
I'm not sure making people live much longer is important, or even desirable.
We fall the earth up as it is.

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ggambetta
> Bell Labs researchers invented the laser, the transistor, the charge-coupled
> device (CCD), information, the UNIX operating system, and the programming
> languages C, and C++.

Bell Labs invented information?!?

~~~
pacala
"information theory"

A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon,
[http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...](http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)

