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“I don’t interact with them,” Felipe Sierra, director of the division of aging biology at NIH’s National Institute on Aging, said. Other top researchers on aging told me much the same. “It’s weird they don’t come to us, look at our patents … We have resources, we are eager to do partnerships and form bio-techs. “Our field is interested in delaying aging and by that, delaying disease. Nir Barzilai, a geneticist and one of the leading researchers in aging based at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the publications didn’t give him any special insights into what Calico is up to. There were no clinical trials or patents filed publicly under the Calico brand that I could find, and out of the 22 papers published by the company and its affiliates, only about half related to aging and many were review articles (not original research). They say ‘no, they can’t talk about what they’re doing.’ I am not sure why that’s the case.” “I have invited them to speak at our program we have on genomic medicine. Since they moved to Google, he can’t seem to reach them. Topol knows some of the scientists at Calico from their pre-Calico days. They expressed confusion or frustration about Calico’s stealthiness, and said the secrecy is not productive for science.Įric Topol is a cardiologist who studies aging and the director of Scripps Translational Science Institute. That Calico won’t say what it’s doing bothers leading aging researchers. It’s not unusual for new startups to be stealthy for a period while they get going, but there’s usually some public statement with specific details about the technology or science being developed, strategies and targets.
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Calico only offers the public the vaguest details about what they’re doing But these values have somehow eluded Calico.įor now, I think it’s safe to say Google has not solved aging. And we’re living in a time when the norms in science, particularly biomedical science, are centered around openness and data sharing. Google also prides itself for being a leader on transparency and for its open culture. One of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world has taken an interest in aging research, with about as much funding as NIH’s entire budget for aging research, yet it’s remarkably opaque. We should pause for a moment to note how strange this is. People who work at Calico, Calico’s outside collaborators, and even folks who were no longer with the company, stonewalled me. The media contacts there didn’t so much as respond to multiple requests for interviews. Among the little more than a dozen press releases Calico has put out, there were only broad descriptions of collaborations with outside labs and pharmaceutical companies - most of them focused on that overwhelmingly vague mission of researching aging and associated diseases. I asked everyone I could about Calico - and quickly learned that it’s an impenetrable fortress. I recently started poking around in Silicon Valley and talking to researchers who study aging and mortality, and discovered that four years after its launch, we still don’t know what Calico is doing. “We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done,” Google CEO Larry Page told Time.īut how exactly would Calico help humans live longer, healthier lives? How would it invest its vast $1.5 billion pool of money? Beyond sharing the company’s ambitious mission - to better understand the biology of aging and treat aging as a disease - Page was vague.
#Calico company how to#
Death about Calico, a then-new Google-run health venture focused on understanding aging - and how to beat it. In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Google vs.