Google's Calico project may be alchemy

by Doctor Science

Vox reporter Julia Belluz wonders what's going on with Google's Calico project, launched in 2013 "to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan."

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.

Belluz considers various possible reason for Calico's secretiveness--secrecy that's out of line with current scientific practice and also with Google's professed open culture. But she doesn't talk about the one that jumps immediately to my mind: that Calico is a scam or a con.

I'm not saying Calico is a deliberate con, where there's a conman who knows it's all a fake. I'm talking about the kind of scam where the mark pays a lot of money for something the seller doesn't realize is worthless: something like homeopathy, for instance. Specifically, Calico reminds me of alchemy.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, I did a lot of thinking and research about the difference between science and magic. This led me to read a lot (including primary sources) about alchemy in the 13th to 17th centuries, and how part of it turned into chemistry. I also was reading the volumes of Science and Civilization in China as they were coming out, especially the multiple tomes about Chinese alchemy (including gunpowder).

I can no longer remember what specific works I read, that led me to conclude that the critical difference between magic and science is communication. The proto-chemists and the alchemists of the Renaissance did the same sorts of experiments or procedures, the difference was how they wrote about them. The proto-chemists struggled to be as clear about what they were doing as possible; the magical alchemists always held something back, becoming opaque or completely metaphorical at crucial points.[1]

The Black Sun by Jörg Breu, from the alchemical text Splendor Solis (1531/32).

Wikipedia:

Sol niger (black sun) can refer to the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus, the nigredo (blackening). In a text ascribed to Marsilio Ficino three suns are described: black, white, and red, corresponding to the three most used alchemical color stages. Of the sol niger he writes:

The body must be dissolved in the subtlest middle air: The body is also dissolved by its own heat and humidity; where the soul, the middle nature holds the principality in the colour of blackness all in the glass: which blackness of Nature the ancient Philosophers called the crows head, or the black sun.

Scientific knowledge is, fundamentally, *shared* knowledge, open knowledge. Ideally, it is broadcast, sent wide into the world. Magical knowledge is hermetic[2]: secret, hidden, open only to those who have the key, who are taught by the correct master. Magic is passed down.

Now look at what Belluz reports that Calico is doing:

Eric Topol is a cardiologist who studies aging and the director of Scripps Translational Science Institute. Topol knows some of the scientists at Calico from their pre-Calico days. "They're hyper secretive," he said. Since they moved to Google, he can't seem to reach them. "I have invited them to speak at our program we have on genomic medicine. They say ‘no, they can't talk about what they're doing.' I am not sure why that's the case." ...

"I don't interact with them," Felipe Sierra, director of the division of aging biology at NIH's National Institute on Aging, said. "They don't want to interact with me. I ignore them as much as they ignore me." He also invited Calico scientists to present at NIH. "They come to the meeting but they don't talk about what they are doing … [They] wouldn't even talk about general directions [of their research]."

They don't publish much, either. For 2016, PubMed only shows 15 publications from Calico; the National Institute on Aging had 623. Belluz says the two institutions have comparable budgets, but that's not correct: NIA's yearly budget is $1.5B, which is the total amount of money Calico supposedly has. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison (I'd love it if someone else could figure out how to do one), but I feel confident that the NIA is getting many more scientific papers per research dollar than Calico is. That's not the only possible metric for scientific progress, of course, but at least it's measurable.

Calico's secrecy would make sense if they were developing salable drugs and procedures -- but they're not filing patents, and their researchers aren't experts on human disease. It's a long, long way from studying mice and naked mole rats to finding something that works for people. Belluz concludes:

Another potential reason for the lack of transparency — the one I find most compelling — is that it's the company culture. Art Levinson, the CEO of Calico, is also chair of the board of Apple Inc. and was close to Steve Jobs, who was renowned for his clandestine approach to research and development and running a business. It's possible that Levinson has made secrecy part of Calico's DNA, the way it's part of Apple's DNA.

A secretive, hermetic approach may be appropriate for commercial R&D, but it's not really science. Scientific research requires openness, so that discoveries can be fact-checked from all sides -- including by people who aren't your friends. Secret projects, hidden labs, clandestine research: that gets you alchemy, not science. And by comparison to science, alchemy doesn't work.

Calico is like alchemy in its secretive, hermetic approach, but of course it's also like alchemy in its choice of subject. Immortality was always a main goal of alchemy in both China and the West.[3] In China in particular, the search for an elixir of immortality was taken very seriously for several thousand years -- and it was always a scam, though one which fooled the alchemists just as much as the emperors who paid them.

I'm certain that the Chinese alchemists really believed the elixirs they prepared, at great trouble and expense, could help their Imperial clients toward immortality. Unfortunately, these elixirs were generally full of heavy and toxic metals -- gold, mercury, arsenic, lead -- and quite a few Emperors died of elixir poisoning. It's an open question whether Emperors kept trying elixirs because they were psychoactive, or because heavy-metal ingestion tends to result in a particularly durable corpse -- but as a route to immortality they were clearly a bust.

I'm not saying that Calico will prove to be a self-scam on that level, but the connection to Apple and Steve Jobs is not encouraging. Steve Jobs died because he trusted his own specialness and hermetic knowledge more than public scientific medicine, even when friends like Dr. Levinson tried to talk him out of it.

Tad Friend at the New Yorker writes:

[A] scientist who's familiar with Calico's workings said that it's pursuing its mission judiciously, but that the company began, fatally, as a vanity project. The scientist said, "This is as self-serving as the Medici building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in. It's based on the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: ‘We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span.' "

This attitude, of being extra-special, more deserving, and much smarter than other people is endemic in Silicon Valley and the tech industry generally, as summed up in a recent xkcd:

Mousover text: "We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."

Secrecy, Not Invented Here-ism, valuing hermetic knowledge: these are the hallmarks of alchemy, not science. Add luck and you can exploit them to get gold, but they won't give you knowledge.

---

1. It took a *lot* of reading for me to realize this, because all 16th-17th century science-like writing is pretty opaque for a 20th-C reader.

2. I'm using lower-case "hermetic" in a general sense, to mean "secret, hidden, known only to an elite." Is there a better synonym?

3. The other alchemical goal, creating gold (or money), is something Silicon Valley has mastered already.

Comments

[wj]

Calico's secrecy would make sense if they were developing salable drugs and procedures -- but they're not filing patents,

There are a couple of possible reasons for not filing patents:

First, there may not, yet, be something both novel enough and valuable enough to be worth patenting. Bearing in mind that the rules for what is patentable, especially with novel technologies, can be quite bizarre.

Second, those involved may see the prospect for valuable (and patentable) results, based on the results that they have in hand, but not wish to give potential competitors a leg up. Such things are not unknown in the IT world.

Third, the results of the research so far may be a novel mix of already known treatments. Some possibly already patented. Even if those results are promising, it might make sense to hold off publication until the best mix is explored -- and perhaps the relevant patent rights acquired.

This is not to say that less charitable explanations might not be correct. Just that they are not the only possible ones. Nor even necessarily the most likely.

[liberal japonicus]

I can no longer remember what specific works I read, that led me to conclude that the critical difference between magic and science is communication.

Fascinating stuff, Doc. I make a related point when I teach students about Japanese sword making. They try to describe things so that they are replicable so their students can make swords, so they have things like 'when the heated metal has the same color as the moon in August'. However, because they don't have instrumentation, rather than science, you get something that is a lot like religion the way the Japanese practice it, so that any element is viewed as being essential to the process. You said 'Chinese alchemists', do you think they were different than western alchemists?

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Trump has MASTERED the arcane art of alchemy.

He proved it by turning BULLSHIT into GOLD.

[CharlesWT]

3. The other alchemical goal, creating gold (or money), is something Silicon Valley has mastered already.

Technically, they've created wealth. Money is the visible manifestation.

[Doctor Science]

LJ:

Were Chinese & Western alchemists different when it came to open communication? It's a good question that needs to be answered by someone fluent in Classical Chinese.

Chinese alchemy was certainly more successful than Western (including Islamic) alchemy. There's gunpowder, for starters, also Cold Food Powder (a mineral-based psychoactive drug that went in and out of style during the first millennium CE), Autumn Mineral (steroid hormone extracts of human urine), and using seaweed extracts to treat goiter.

Chinese alchemy (like much of Chinese science and technology) was Taoist, which meant it was always in tension with Confucian authority.

[CharlesWT]

(Hmmm...according to the sidebar, wj has posted an invisible comment.)

[CharlesWT]

(No, I got my threads mixed up... :} )

[wj]

Drat! And here I was all ready to be impressed with myself. Even if I had no clue how I'd done it.

[RobertK]

I'm using lower-case "hermetic" in a general sense, to mean "secret, hidden, known only to an elite." Is there a better synonym?

Technically, occult used to mean precisely this, but semantic drift has not been kind to it. recondite?

[Dave W.]

I wouldn't put too much stock in the secrecy so far. The NSA notoriously hardly publishes anything, but that doesn't mean they've been unable to innovate. If you have enough of the leading experts communicating with each other internally, you can innovate for quite a while without communicating externally.

[Lurker]

I think that "esoteric" might also be a passable synonym for "hermetic".

BTW, I had studied mathematics on university level for three years when I first realised that "Hermitian" matrix was named this because of Charles Hermite, not because of Hermes Trismegistos. I had thought that the spelling was just odd. (And in Finnish, it is called hermiittinen, while "hermetic" is hermeettinen , which is even closer.)

[Hartmut]

The original Western (in the widest sense) idea about alchemy was that the alchemist would help nature to perfect itself and by doing so work on his or her own self-perfection. Why nature would want to turn into purple (gold being only the next to last step) is to me an open question. What use is a dye when there's no cloth left to use it on? ;-)

[Lurker]

Hartmut,

I think that the practical idea buhund alchemt was the fact that medieval metallurgy was quite imperfect. It was, indeed, possible to extrat gold from e.g. copper, because usually, copper was quite impure.

I have metallurgist friends who have sometimes remarked that a 19th century copperplate may have so high a gold content that the player's value is dominated by the gold impurity, not by the price of copper. In such a case, the quest for transmutation is essentially a quest for purification of already-existing gold. When the Swedish "mountain chemists" (bergchemister of the 16th century embarked on this avenue of research, they created the modern chemistry. (In fact, they mostly worked with baser metals, because that was where the money was. Sweden was the foremost exporter of copper and iron in the Early Modern Europe.)

[sanbikinoraion]

DS, your "Jobs died" link is broken.

[Doctor Science]

sanbikinoraion:

Thank you! fixed now

[Hartmut]

Lurker, alchemy is far older and the red craze is from a time when purple dye was worth more than its weight in gold, so that explains why the grand elixier (lit: philosopher's stone, i.e. not a liquid) was supposed to be of that colour.
The question is why nature would want to turn all matter into a homogeneous substance, seemingly having produced humans as catalyst for that purpose.
And, no, this is not really a serious question but a slight mocking of the basic idea behind it.

As for gold impurities, after WW1 there was a super secret German project (involving even Nobel laureates) to extract gold from seawater in order to pay the war reparations. Science profitted from it but it turned out to be an economic dud.

[Bruce B.]

First a sidebar/digression, then back to the main topic of tonight' symposium.

Probably worth noting that Apple has always done a fair amount of research that is published, particular when it comes to interface and accessible. This 2015 paper, for instance, sounds interesting: "Cross-Cultural User Experience Design: Helping Product Designers to Consider Cultural Differences", with this abstract:

ABSTRACT: User Experience (UX) designers aim to create a product that causes a pleasant emotional reaction in order to generate an enjoyable memory. However, emotions are subjective and diverse because of cultural differences. As a consequence, cultural differences in UX design are often considered only as theoretical exercises. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between theoretical cultural studies and practical application. We analyze established cultural dimensions as well as notes from observational studies, business presentations and ethnographic interviews. Finally, we present “Cultural Personas”, application-oriented tools that characterize derived cultural differences. That supports designers to consider a culturally sensitive UX and thereby to develop better, more enjoyable products.

But yeah, communication does seem like a great threshold for science and magic.

There's a lot to dislike about right-wing think tank dude Angelo Codevilla, but his 1992 book Informing Statecraft remains an excellent read - his extended rant on why policy made in secret is reliably worse than policy made publicly and actually subject to public response is great. Just the same concerns as with science where people do it secretly, really.

[Bruce B.]

I should have proofread. I didn't mean "interface and accessible", I meant "interface and accessibility", the latter covering research into how various kinds of physical disability impair one's ability to use typical interfaces and what fixes those gaps. An increasingly deaf friend of mine tells me that Apple folks turn up a lot in the bibliographies for audiology-related papers, for instance.

[Nigel]

I make a related point when I teach students about Japanese sword making...

Which is, surely, technology - something we had plenty of long before the scientific method.
And perhaps commercial scientific endeavour carried out in secret falls into this category ?

As an aside, I am reading John James'entertainimg historical novel Votan, and his eponymous hero has just brought about the Ingerli sword by teaching the smith to write his name.

[Nigel]

That should read Ingelrii.

[Scott P.]

"As an aside, I am reading John James'entertainimg historical novel Votan, and his eponymous hero has just brought about the Ingerli sword by teaching the smith to write his name."

Well, it's no coincidence Fëanor was both a master smith and the inventor of writing.

[liberal japonicus]

Nigel, interesting observation. Though where do we draw the line at what technology is? Clovis points and atlatls are, to my mind, technology and their use gave technological advantages to the users.

But Japanese sword makers, by and large, were willing to share their secrets with a larger community, within reason. However, what they didn't have was a way to codify those observations, which seems to be a step that science deals with.

[Doctor Science]

Hartmut:

The redness of alchemical preparations isn't particularly related to Tyrian purple, because it was characteristic of Chinese alchemy, too.

Needham discusses the curious fact that Chinese and Classical (whence Islamic & Western) alchemy are strongly similar. Both linked gold and immortality, trying to find a "true gold" that could grant a gold-like immortality to the alchemist or consumer. Both also did a lot of work with mercury compounds and their color changes, and used a metaphor of a marriage or male-female union.

Needham speculated that Chinese alchemy, like Western, was inspired by what had been heard of Ancient Egypt: that Egyptians had methods for preserving bodies indefinitely, covered in gold (cf. King Tut).

And wow, it still happens today: Chinese Buddhist monk mummified and covered in gold leaf. *boggles*

[wj]

The reason for gold being linked to immortality is pretty obvious.

Most metals corrode/rust. Just as people age. But gold does not. So, once refined, gold is immortal.

[Doctor Science]

wj:

Obvious to us, yes. But very much not part of Chinese tradition, in which gold was not outstandingly valued and jade was associated with immortality (jade burial suits, for instance).

It seems likely that these standard alchemical elements came into China with Buddhism, from India.

[liberal japonicus]

There is a chapter in this book titled Life and Immortality in the mind of Han China that might be of interest. I'm not sure how much he can be relied on, but Bruce Chatwin in What am I Doing Here? talks about Ferghana and the Heavenly Horses and the quest for immortality, relating it to our own merry-go-rounds, which I remembered when Don Draper in Mad Men made his pitch about Kodak's then new slide carousel. Great stuff to mull over.

[Hartmut]

The Greeks believed that alchemy originated in Egypt and they were likely correct. But I would not exclude certain influences from Mesopotamia that could have radiated both West and East (through Elam, part of modern Iran, if that was not itself a source).
We know that Egyptians tried to imitate valuable things and did not see this as deceptive (or they would not have put the recipes into their tombs even boasting that their imitations were at times better than the real stuff*). In traditional alchemy 'real' means sharing the most important characteristics with the 'really real', i.e. stuff is characterized not by its inner physical nature but the outward appearance. The sulphur mercury theory (based on much older ideas) considered 'our' mercury and sulphur as not the real ones but contaminated imperfect manifestations of the pure ('philosophical') real (in the Platonic sense I presume) sulphur and mercury.

*given that there would be a trial in the afterlife it would be rather stupid to carry the hard evidence of fraud with you.

[Joe]

You said it;
"open only to those who have the key, who are taught by the correct master. Magic is passed down."

Yes, because when all is said and done, they are going to keep the key within and this is not going to be science but something the 1% rich population gets access to, and genetics (or gene therapy) from - as to pass it down.

[Fair Economist]

There's a long-standing tradition of self-delusion in aging research - going back to the Chinese alchemists you mention, at least, but continuing into the current day. The on-going obsession with "antioxidants" was set off by Pearson and Shaw's popularization of some basic science on using them for aging. That turned out to be more about how the inbred rodent strains used in research are profoundly messed up and you can do a lot to help them, but that doesn't help real populations because they don't have the genetic defects. The obsession continues even though human studies 20 years ago showed high antioxidant doses don't help, and often hurt, in humans.

Resveratrol seems to be following a similar pathway, although it's proponents are mostly much more credible that Pearson and Shaw. Well, except for the one that published dozens of intentionally fraudulent papers, which is actually much worse.

[Raven]

When recovering from a concussion that had triggered a tailspin depression back in 1980, I found a helpful guiding image in the memory of a little Catskills-region-published booklet I'd read a decade earlier about "spiritual alchemy", which took the three stages of developing the Philosopher's Stone to be those of developing the healthy human soul: nigredo, blackening (the Dark Night of the Soul, depression); albedo, whitening (purification, emptying your baggage of heavy rocks); rubedo, reddening (ripening, maturity). With that viewpoint, what at first had seemed a state of utter hopelessness became a state leading to eventual hope, and I just had to hold my breath long enough to reach air.