For Google, things are getting personal.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the company whose stated mission is to order the world's information and make it useful has begun an ambitious project to understand what it means to be a healthy human being.
The effort, called Baseline Study, will start by gathering data on 175 people. Later, thousands more people will be included.
The aim is to use collect massive amounts of samples from a battery of tests, established and new, and then use the company's computational muscle to extract patterns and identify factors that affect human health.
The project is run by Andrew Conrad, 50, a molecular biologist whose previous work involved screening for HIV in blood-plasma donations. His team, with 70 to 100 members, includes experts in physiology, molecular biology, optics, imaging, and biochemistry.
This is not the first attempt at a massive medical and genomic study, but none has ever brought the computational power and expertise of Google. Another huge challenge will be to maintain participants' privacy. The data will not be shared with insurance companies, Google has said.
Does Project Baseline sound like something you're uninterested in? Well, make sure you get these 7 blood tests every man should have.
