Google says it's contemplating a science project it's calling the Baseline Study intended to explore the human body for the best-ever representation of what makes for a healthy human.
Anonymous molecular and genetic information will be collected from people -- around 175 at first, followed by thousands as the project progresses -- in the hopes it can help researchers detect human diseases such as cancer and heart disease earlier than ever before, the Internet search giant says.
The aim is to move medicine in the direction of prevention instead of the treatment of disease, it says.
The project is being overseen by molecular biologist Andrew Conrad, who joined Google's research arm last year and has put together a research team including experts in biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology and optics.
The team intends to create a dataset that in size and scope will dwarf that of any created in previous studies, Google says.
Scanning and analyzing a huge amount of data using computers will hopefully reveal patterns to serve as biomarkers that will allow diagnosis of disease at an earlier stage.
"With any complex system, the notion has always been there to proactively address problems," Conrad says. "That's not revolutionary. We are just asking the question: If we really wanted to be proactive, what would we need to know? You need to know what the fixed, well-running thing should look like."
Google certainly possesses the computing horsepower to do this, as it operates one of the largest networks of computers and data centers in the world to power its web searches and data-hungry offerings such as its video-heavy YouTube website.
Conrad and his team acknowledge the research will be taking a giant step into the unknown, into the complexities of the human body and the interplay within between DNA, hormones, proteins and enzymes and the way they are impacted by external environmental factors such as diet.
Any advances will likely come in "little increments," Conrad says he expects.
That's a realistic attitude, fellow Baseline researcher Sam Gambhir of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University's medical school says.
"He [Conrad] gets that this is not a software project that will be done in one or two years," Gambhir says. "We used to talk about curing cancer and doing this in a few years. We've learned to not say those things anymore."
The massive amounts of data that will be collected does raise privacy issues, Gambhir acknowledges.
One the study gets underway, institutional review boards at the medical schools of Stanford and Duke University will control how the gathered information is used, he says.
"That's certainly an issue that's been discussed," Gambhir says. "Google will not be allowed free reign to do whatever it wants with this data."
