Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

Author:Chip Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

16 | FIRST PRINCIPLES

The day Larry Page posted his famous blog announcing Calico’s arrival, Art Levinson was well into ruminating on who might make up the company’s leadership. Hal Barron was one of the candidates. He was a Yale Med School cardiologist who had been Genentech’s chief medical officer for 12 years before serving the same role at Roche when the Swiss company bought the remainder of Genentech in 2009. Levinson already considered Barron the best drug developer in the world—so when Barron reached out, Levinson immediately asked him to become Calico’s president of research and development.

Another key executive was David Botstein, the selfsame firebrand who 30 years earlier had risen up at the meeting in Cold Spring and harangued the assembled scientists on the injustice of spending billions to sequence the human genome. A “program for unemployed bombmakers” were his exact words. Since then, Botstein had become a believer. The years had transformed him into one of those statesman-scientists whose intellectual capital and political mileage were honored and valued more than his fulminations. He could still be gruff and cantankerous, though, and rarely withheld his opinion if one came to mind, which was often. Like Barron and Levinson, Botstein was also new to the field of aging. Genetics was his wheelhouse, and he was considered one of the world’s experts. He had even written a book on the subject, Decoding the Language of Genetics, which combined his insights into the history of genetics with efforts to make the arcane language in the field easier to comprehend. Everyone was grateful for that.

Cynthia Kenyon contacted Levinson the minute the news of Calico hit the wires. She was one of the true leading lights in the longevity field, the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco. She would head up all of the company’s research on aging.

Bob Cohen, an M.D. and oncology specialist, joined the brain trust too. Cohen and Levinson went way back to the early 1990s, where he had helped Genentech and Levinson develop some of their most successful breakthrough cancer drugs. Cohen had a knack for connecting scientific advances that related to human disease. And Levinson knew his opinions and insights would be absolutely honest: something Levinson greatly valued.

Three years later, in 2016, Calico would also bring in Daphne Koller as chief computing officer. Koller’s pedigree in AI was undisputed. She had landed her first university degree when she was 17, and then a master’s a year later, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. That was 1986. By 1995, she had won her Ph.D. in computer science at Berkeley and was teaching at Stanford’s computer science department. In 2004, the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a $500,000 “genius” grant. She used some of the time and money to do research with biologists at UCSF, Levinson and Kenyon’s old stomping grounds. While there, she developed a new type of cancer gene map that used Bayesian techniques to help explain why breast tumors in some cancers spread to bone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.