"Illness and aging affect all our families," Google CEO Larry Page said in a statement on their blog. "With some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives."
With that, Google is starting up a new company with the focus on improving health and the negative affects of aging. The company, Calico, will be helmed by Art Levinson, chairman of Apple's board and former CEO of Genentech. Interestingly enough, Levinson will stay on Apple's board while being CEO of Calico, which is a collaboration of sorts for Google and Apple, two companies that were cool tempered with each other before, but have been big time adversaries in the mobile wars between Android and iPhone. "For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking," Apple CEO Tim Cook said. "Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way."
Even curing cancer won't be enough for Calico, according the Page: "One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you'd add about three years to people's average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that'll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it's very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it's not as big an advance as you might think."
We don't know how Calico will exactly go about improving healthcare and biotechnology, but if Google wants to make something happen, it usually does.
That's a good thing for us, in this case.
[via Gizmodo]
