Robert Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press.
There is a growing minority of scientists and thinkers who are more vocal about the paradigm for our generation and those that follow, and who are more vocal about the paradigm for our generation and those that follow. will be to bring down death. Important people such as gerontologist Aubrey de Greyor the scholar inventor Ray Kurzweil that in 2012 he was appointed director of engineering and, a year later, launched a subcompany called Calico whose mission is to "solve death". With him, another fervent believer in immortality was also called to join the work of the company: Bill Maris to chair the investment fund Google Ventures.
Although it sounds like a script for a science fiction movie, Calico - an acronym for California Life Company - is a company founded by Google in 2013, whose vice president, Cynthia Kenyon, is a renowned researcher who seeks to slow the effects of aging in people.
In the last century, the average age of life expectancy of human beings has doubled: we went from an average of 40 years to just over 75. This achievement was due, to a greater extent, to improvements in socioeconomic conditions and the improvement of people's quality of life and not due to objective improvements in the reduction of chronic diseases; this increase in the aspiration of longevity has opened an enormous path and market for the search for drugs or procedures that delay or lessen the effects of time on human beings.
The research that made Dr. Kenyon's investigations famous were those carried out in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans of no more than 1 mm, an element that had a maximum life span of two weeks and whose Daf-2 gene was modified, resulting in the doubling of its life span.
The scientist is sure that the leap that would cause the discovery of a gene like the one that was modified in nematodes, would be a revolution in the field of medicine. Calico was created with a budget of 1 thousand 300 million dollars as an answer of the giant Google for the improvement of health.
Not only has its objective attracted attention, which is ultimately to slow the effects of aging, but also because, since its creation, it has not given tangible signs of its work and this situation has raised around it various speculations and a halo of mystery in Silicon Valley.
One of the obstacles they have faced is that the studies they are conducting are not to attack a disease itself, so the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not authorized it as a treatment because it is not considered old age as a disease.
Another way to continue studies is by conducting animal studies and, in this way, find advances that can be tested later in humans and, under this approach, find something that was present, but has not yet been possible to identify - a hormone, a gene, and so on. Innovation is what Kenyon and his team are looking for; however, the road is not easy and an effective discovery in this field is still far away.
