Google Wants to Help You Live Longer
From Calico to modern healthtech — how tech giants are using AI to extend human life.
title: "Google Wants to Help You Live Longer" slug: "google-wants-help-you-live-longer" description: "From Calico to modern healthtech — how tech giants are using AI to extend human life." datePublished: "2013-10-07" dateModified: "2026-03-15" category: "Healthcare AI" tags: ["Google", "healthcare", "longevity", "AI"] tier: 3 originalUrl: "http://www.applieddatalabs.com/content/google-wants-help-you-live-longer" waybackUrl: "https://web.archive.org/web/20131007153003/http://www.applieddatalabs.com:80/content/google-wants-help-you-live-longer"
Google Wants to Help You Live Longer
In October 2013, Larry Page announced Calico, a brand new company backed by Google (now Alphabet). Its mission: increase life expectancy and improve health. I was excited. Here was a company that could focus on fixing health problems without the pressure of quarterly earnings. "In some industries, it takes ten or twenty years to go from an idea to something being real," Page said. "Healthcare is certainly one of those areas."
I argued at the time that Calico was the kind of health company we'd needed for a long time. One that could play the long game. I speculated that Google's real motive was partly to keep people alive longer so they'd spend more time searching the internet. Half-joking.
Thirteen years later, Calico is still around. But Google's most important contributions to healthcare came from a direction nobody expected: AI.
The Calico Question
Calico still operates, headquartered in South San Francisco, with around 300 employees and partnerships with AbbVie worth up to $1.5 billion. They've published research on the biology of aging, particularly studying long-lived organisms like naked mole-rats. But there are no commercial products. No drugs on the market. No breakthroughs that have changed how medicine is practiced.
That's not necessarily a failure. Aging research is genuinely a decades-long endeavor, and Calico is doing serious science. But it hasn't been the revolutionary health company that the 2013 announcement suggested.
The irony is that Google's actual health AI breakthroughs came through different organizations entirely.
Larry Page announced Calico in 2013 to solve aging. Thirteen years later, Google's biggest health impact came not from a longevity lab but from an AI system that predicted protein structures better than any human scientist.
DeepMind: The Real Health AI Story
In 2020, Google's DeepMind subsidiary solved a 50-year-old problem in biology. Their AlphaFold system predicted the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences with accuracy that matched experimental methods. This matters because protein structure determines function, and understanding function is essential for drug design. Scientists had been trying to crack this problem since the 1970s.
AlphaFold didn't just beat previous computational methods. It essentially made them obsolete. DeepMind released predicted structures for 200 million proteins, covering nearly every known protein on Earth. Researchers worldwide started using this data to design new drugs, understand disease mechanisms, and engineer enzymes for industrial use. The scientific community reacted with something approaching shock. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold.
In 2021, DeepMind spun out Isomorphic Labs, explicitly focused on using AI for drug discovery. The company signed deals worth up to $2.9 billion with Eli Lilly and Novartis. The premise is that AI can dramatically shorten the drug discovery process, which traditionally takes 10-15 years and costs over $1 billion per successful drug.
Med-PaLM and Clinical AI
Google also built Med-PaLM, a large language model specifically trained for medical knowledge. Med-PaLM 2, released in 2023, scored at an expert physician level on medical exam questions and could answer patient queries with clinically accurate, empathetic responses. Google began testing it in clinical settings at the Mayo Clinic and HCA Healthcare.
Med-PaLM represents a completely different approach than Calico. Instead of solving the biology of aging, it applies AI to the information problem in medicine: helping doctors access knowledge faster and synthesizing literature that no human can keep up with.
The Pivot History
Google's health efforts followed a winding path: Google Health v1 (2008, shut down 2012), Calico (2013, still running but no products), Verily (2015, pivoted multiple times), Google Health v2 (2018, dissolved 2021), and Isomorphic Labs (2021, now with major pharma partnerships).
The pattern is clear: Google kept trying to enter healthcare, kept stumbling on the system's complexity, and found its strongest angle through pure AI research rather than patient-facing products.
What This Means for Health AI
Google's health AI journey illustrates a broader truth about applying AI to complex, regulated industries. Technical brilliance isn't enough. AlphaFold was a scientific masterpiece, but turning protein structure predictions into actual drugs that help patients will take years of clinical trials, regulatory approval, and navigating a healthcare system that moves slowly for good reasons.
The companies that succeed in health AI will be the ones that understand the operational reality of healthcare: regulatory requirements, clinician workflows, and the patient trust that has to be earned. Larry Page said healthcare was a ten-to-twenty-year journey. He was right about the timeline. The destination just turned out to be different than anyone expected.