About Google's plans to shoot the moon

According to Google, who three weeks ago announced the beginning of his “Moon Shot project”, some reputable publications have already passed. But I am not an authoritative publication yet, so I can afford to comment on the news with a considerable delay. The comment has ripened because in no edition I have seen what seems to me the most important in this story.

For a start, I will duplicate the news, because you may not have heard of it yet. Google said that he was launching "the most ambitious and complex research project in history." The project is to research 175 healthy people and, on the basis of this study, establish the “level of a healthy person” (whatever that means). Those. Google wants to find out how a healthy person should look like, what should be the “norm”. I understand that all this sounds very vague. It is necessary to give the formulation of some measurable goals. But I do not have it, because Google did not provide anything like this.
')
After Google announced that it was going to make mankind happy, the scientific community rebelled great. Craig Venter , who is going to sequence 1,000,000 genomes (not only human, but also bacteria living in humans), almost called Google’s children, saying that they are doing “a child’s little step, much smaller than what we are doing.”

And the MIT Technology Review edition did not like the comparison of the Google project with the flight to the moon. In this connection, they delicately reminded Google of what this flight was. They also drew attention to the biography of the leader of the Google project. He, it turns out, is the co-founder of the California Institute of Health and Longevity. It sounds impressive, but in fact it turned out that the institute is an elite SPA salon, where you will be offered an acupuncture session and lessons on cooking healthy food.

In general, Google got a little bit (although, in an amicable way, it should have gotten stronger), because you should not immodestly promote in an area where much more serious people are working on much more serious projects (for example, 100,000 Genomes Project ) .

However, there is something in the Google project that worries me more than the scale, which is not commensurate with the level of PR.

This is an attempt to go from the norm, and not from the pathology. The concept of norms at the level of biomarkers should be much broader than the concept of pathology. I think that studying only healthy people will not allow Google to finally understand how a healthy person should look like. Unless, of course, they are going to explore all healthy people on earth.

Photos taken from here: blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/25/meet-the-google-x-life-sciences-team