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I can’t wait for Gmail alerts telling me I have a disease…
Google, givers of great things like a search engine (remember that?), Android and Google Maps now wants to bring us its next great project: the perfect human.
What’s that? Yeah, Google is getting into the people-making game. Their new project—“Baseline”—is looking to get a complete picture of a perfectly healthy human. And how will they collect this data? YOU.
Google’s Project Baseline
Yeah, you’re the project. Google wants a bunch of people to voluntarily submit their entire body or whatever. Google will be mapping the subject’s entire genome, their parents genome, what current diseases they have or other things wrong with them, and pretty much everything about your body and how it functions. What’s the end game? Preventative health.
Google–and the doctors, scientists, and biologists they’re working with—want to better be able to predict diseases based off what the perfect human body should look like. Think of it like a golf swing—we know what the swing should look like, so if your ball goes off to the left or right, we can find out how to correct it and get you on that perfect swing.
They want to gather all of this data on the volunteers and their bodies so that they can look for biomarkers—essentially signs that point towards certain dispositions. For instance, a biomarker might be a certain pattern in the data that would show that a person is more likely to be affected by a heart condition down the road.
Google just wants to build the perfect human, y’all. Oh, and they also want to market it in their Android apps and ecosystem. You didn’t think this was all for the betterment of mankind, did you? C’mon, this is Google. With this mass amount of health data, it could be beneficial to sell this data to the health sector or people that make health apps and software. Fitbits with cholesterol readers? That’s what the endgame here is. Apple comes out with their Healthkit array of apps and Google was all, “That’s great, we’re going to tell you about diseases before you get them. Only on Android.”
But in all seriousness, this is a great move towards how we track our own health and what the future of medicine may be. While it does have the Google name attached to it—and may have some nefarious, money-grabbing undertones—the overall project is great.
