6 ms·

Update on Google’s Secretive Startup Calico Labs

41 points by apsec112 9y ago

throwaway8184 9y ago
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.
- Roritharr 9y ago
  This is a great train of thought. Are there any Manhattan Project Level undertakings out there? If not, is there a Patreon for one? ;)
  - kornish 9y ago
    I know it's cliche, but still worth mentioning - Musk's synergistic portfolio of companies, each derived from relatively specific and ambitious goals, seems similar. He is the common thread between all his companies and is thus is arguably able to marshal their strategies in subtle and important ways.
    - ForHackernews 9y ago
      I think a more plausible description is that he's using shady financial engineering to prop up failing firms at the expense of investors to his other companies: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/18/solarcity-teslas-solar-boondoggle.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/18/solarcity-teslas-s... > The logic of the buyout never made much sense in the first place, unless you looked at the hundreds of millions of dollars Elon Musk, Peter Rive, and Lyndon Rive would lose in stock and bond value if SolarCity went under. This is looking more and more like a bailout and Tesla may eventually have to take a massive loss on solar operations.
- burkaman 9y ago
  If there had been no urgent reason to be the first to get an atom bomb, wouldn't the world be much better off if the Manhattan Project had taken the Calico strategy? We'd have a much wider array of advances in many different disciplines, and the knowledge would be spread out among many institutions, rather than locked away under one roof. And maybe we wouldn't have an atom bomb, which is a good thing in my hypothetical world where nobody else is trying to make one. > Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. I think it's clear that they don't. Their stated mission is not "cure death", it's "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." They hope to "build a Bell Labs of aging research." This is not Manhattan project talk, this is what you say when you want to support an ecosystem of research, and you have no idea what the outcomes will be. If you're trying to improve the world, which is what they say, I think Bell Labs is a much better model than the Manhattan Project. > No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. What do you mean by this? Do you not see stuff like LHC and LIGO as "big things"? What big problems do you see today that our grandparents would have solved by now?
  - apsec112 9y ago
    100,000 people die every day of diseases caused by aging. If that isn't an urgent reason, I'm not sure what would be. http://santafejeeptours.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Santa-Fe-Jeep-Tours-Bonanza-Creek-Manhattan-Gate.jpg http://santafejeeptours.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Santa... (from the TV show "Manhattan")
    - burkaman 9y ago
      Right, but there's not going to be one solution to "diseases caused by aging". If you spend 5 years exclusively trying to rejuvenate a dog, and you actually succeed, are you really better off than if you had spent that time and money exploring a number of strategies and using existing research infrastructure? I mean if somebody theorized a single device that might cure aging, then the Manhattan Project might be a good model. But nobody even knows what the goals should be, what projects will work, what areas should be studied. We don't know enough to start a singularly focused project.
- greeneggs 9y ago
  I don't think that a strategy designed for a specific engineering problem is likely to succeed on a huge scientific problem. In fact, if you prematurely treat a scientific challenge as an engineering one, you'll generally just end up wasting your money, with little incremental progress or positive side effects. Has top-down science ever worked? (For example, you can throw away a huge amount of money developing chemotherapy regimes by just screening tons of random chemicals and running large trials. But the amount of progress you'll make will be trivial compared to what you could do by spending the same money on understanding the mechanisms of specific cancers.)
- neves 9y ago
  A little difference is that during the Manhattan project you had the Humanity greatest minds unemployed and relocating to the USA.
  - idlewords 9y ago
    Another difference is that atomic fission is a dozen or two orders of magnitude simpler than biology.
  - chimprich 9y ago
    The world's population is greater today, with a significantly higher proportion of scientists (and highly educated people in general), far easier access to the world's information and 75 years or so of further scientific research.
ggambetta 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  "information theory" A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon, http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...
atomical 9y ago
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 9y ago
  The literal name of the disease is "adult onset diabetes"
hossbeast 9y ago
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.
ggm 9y ago
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.
kvonhorn 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
jbergens 9y ago
I'm not sure making people live much longer is important, or even desirable. We fall the earth up as it is.

41 points by apsec112 9y ago

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.

Roritharr 9y ago
This is a great train of thought. Are there any Manhattan Project Level undertakings out there? If not, is there a Patreon for one? ;)
- kornish 9y ago
  I know it's cliche, but still worth mentioning - Musk's synergistic portfolio of companies, each derived from relatively specific and ambitious goals, seems similar. He is the common thread between all his companies and is thus is arguably able to marshal their strategies in subtle and important ways.
  - ForHackernews 9y ago
    I think a more plausible description is that he's using shady financial engineering to prop up failing firms at the expense of investors to his other companies: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/18/solarcity-teslas-solar-boondoggle.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/18/solarcity-teslas-s... > The logic of the buyout never made much sense in the first place, unless you looked at the hundreds of millions of dollars Elon Musk, Peter Rive, and Lyndon Rive would lose in stock and bond value if SolarCity went under. This is looking more and more like a bailout and Tesla may eventually have to take a massive loss on solar operations.
burkaman 9y ago
If there had been no urgent reason to be the first to get an atom bomb, wouldn't the world be much better off if the Manhattan Project had taken the Calico strategy? We'd have a much wider array of advances in many different disciplines, and the knowledge would be spread out among many institutions, rather than locked away under one roof. And maybe we wouldn't have an atom bomb, which is a good thing in my hypothetical world where nobody else is trying to make one. > Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. I think it's clear that they don't. Their stated mission is not "cure death", it's "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." They hope to "build a Bell Labs of aging research." This is not Manhattan project talk, this is what you say when you want to support an ecosystem of research, and you have no idea what the outcomes will be. If you're trying to improve the world, which is what they say, I think Bell Labs is a much better model than the Manhattan Project. > No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. What do you mean by this? Do you not see stuff like LHC and LIGO as "big things"? What big problems do you see today that our grandparents would have solved by now?
- apsec112 9y ago
  100,000 people die every day of diseases caused by aging. If that isn't an urgent reason, I'm not sure what would be. http://santafejeeptours.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Santa-Fe-Jeep-Tours-Bonanza-Creek-Manhattan-Gate.jpg http://santafejeeptours.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Santa... (from the TV show "Manhattan")
  - burkaman 9y ago
    Right, but there's not going to be one solution to "diseases caused by aging". If you spend 5 years exclusively trying to rejuvenate a dog, and you actually succeed, are you really better off than if you had spent that time and money exploring a number of strategies and using existing research infrastructure? I mean if somebody theorized a single device that might cure aging, then the Manhattan Project might be a good model. But nobody even knows what the goals should be, what projects will work, what areas should be studied. We don't know enough to start a singularly focused project.
greeneggs 9y ago
I don't think that a strategy designed for a specific engineering problem is likely to succeed on a huge scientific problem. In fact, if you prematurely treat a scientific challenge as an engineering one, you'll generally just end up wasting your money, with little incremental progress or positive side effects. Has top-down science ever worked? (For example, you can throw away a huge amount of money developing chemotherapy regimes by just screening tons of random chemicals and running large trials. But the amount of progress you'll make will be trivial compared to what you could do by spending the same money on understanding the mechanisms of specific cancers.)
neves 9y ago
A little difference is that during the Manhattan project you had the Humanity greatest minds unemployed and relocating to the USA.
- idlewords 9y ago
  Another difference is that atomic fission is a dozen or two orders of magnitude simpler than biology.
- chimprich 9y ago
  The world's population is greater today, with a significantly higher proportion of scientists (and highly educated people in general), far easier access to the world's information and 75 years or so of further scientific research.

ggambetta 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
"information theory" A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon, http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...

atomical 9y ago

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 9y ago
The literal name of the disease is "adult onset diabetes"

hossbeast 9y ago

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.

ggm 9y ago

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.

kvonhorn 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

jbergens 9y ago

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