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.
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