The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one.

Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make things more difficult to maintain.

Jeff was also prone to dad jokes, Sanjay's humor was far more subtle. Both were awesome to talk to and one of my proudest moments was when Jeff read a document proposal I wrote ("Google should get involved in Genomics Research and Drug Discovery") and took it seriously.

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ramraj07 a day ago | parent [-]

Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed.

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dekhn a day ago | parent [-]

At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery.

Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wanted (which led to Verily focusing on medical devices, which is a terrible industry to be in). They've pivoted a few times without much real success. My hope is that Alphabet sheds Verily (they've been trying) or just admit it's a failure and shut it down. It was just never run with the right philosophy.

Calico... that came out of Larry and Art Levinson- I guess Larry thought Art knew the secret to living forever and by giving him billions Art would come up with the solution to immortality and Larry would have first access to it. But they were ultra-secretive and tried to have the best of both worlds- full access to Google3 and borg, but without Googlers having any access to calico. That, combined with a number of other things, have led Calico to just be a quiet and not very interesting research group. I expect it to disband at some point.

Isomorphic is more recent than any of the stuff I was involved in, and is DeepMind (specifically Demis's) attempt to commercialize their work with AlphaFold. However, everybody in the field knows the strategy of 1. solve protein structure prediction 2. ??? 3. design profitable drugs and get them approved... is not a great strategy because protein structure determine has not ever been the rate limiting step to identifying targets and developing leads. I agree I don't really see a future for it but Demis has at least 10-20 years of runway before he has to take off or bail.

All of my suggestions were just for Google to do research with the community and publish it (especially the model code and weights, but also pipelines to prep data for learning) and turn a few of the ideas into products in Google Cloud(that's how Google Genomics was born... I was talking to Jeff, and he said "if we compress the genome enough, we can store it all on Flash, which would make search fast but cheap, and we'd have a useful product for genomics analysis companies"). IMHO Jeff's team substantially achieved their goals before the DeepMind stuff- DeepVariant was well-respected, but almost every person who worked on it and related systems got burned out and moved on.

What is success, anyway, in biotech? Is it making a drug that makes a lot of money? What if you do that, but it costs so much that people go bankrupt taking it? Or is the goal to make substantial improvements to the technology, potentially discovering key biological details that truly improve people's lives? Many would say that becoming a successful real estate ownership company is the real destination of any successful pharma/biotech.

	▲	ramraj07 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Whoa. Finally someone I relate with! Thanks for such amazing intel! In my opinion forays into biology by moonshot hopefuls fail for one of two reasons: either they completely ignore all the current wisdom from academia and industry, or they recruit the very academia people who are culturally responsible for the science rot we have at this time. Calico (and CZI, and im starting to fear, Arc) fell prey to the latter. Once you recruit one tenured professor IMO youre done. The level of tenure track trauma and academic rot they bring in can burn even a trillion dollars into dead-end initiatives. IMO (after decades of daydreaming about this scenario), the only plausible way to recreate a Bell labs for Biology is to start something behind a single radical person, and recruit the smartest undergrads into that place directly. Ensure that they never become experts at just one thing so they have no allegiance to a method or field. And then let that hoarde loose on a single problem and see what comes out. For better or worse neuralink seems to be doing that right. Just wish they didnt abuse the monkeys that much! To me success in biotechnology is if I measurably help make a drug that makes a person smile and breathe easy that would otherwise not have. Surprisingly easy and hard at the same time.