FutureFeedForward: Google's upcoming body search
FutureFeedForward, the venerable comedic science fiction mailing list, is back! After several years' hiatus, FFF is once again publishing short news missives from a darkly funny future (and there's even a novel in the works).
MOUNTAIN VIEW--Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. "Google has long been dedicated to making information both useful and universally accessible," notes Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind. "We're happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President's toenails."Link
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That's "good news, everyone!" I'd loved and missed FFF; they're like The Onion and the old FTL Newsfeeds from the early days of the SciFi Channel rolled into one.
Funny, I was just last week wondering what had become of one of my old favorites, FFF. Apparently they were just stuck in development hiatus for awhile. Welcome back!
The concept of a "Google Body" program in terms of a variant of 3D-mapper Google Earth may not be that far off -- for instance, NBC11 once reported that eHumans.com (which tries to map the human body in accessible 3D) was also talking to Google for this project. (My requests for comments from eHumans.com have been ignored by the way, so I don't know if Google actually ever did get involved in any way.)
Philipp, I also inquired with eHumans but similarly got no response. Strange. I think "working with Google" may be more wishful thinking in this case, though their association with Stanford means it's at least possible.
That said, there are other groups working on a "Google Earth for the Human Body" application with all the technical challenges that entails (see this).
Most of them aren't public yet and I'm sure there are a few more I don't know about. But I don't think the basic app is 15 years away, but more like 2-5. Right now, I imagine a lot of people are already thinking about how useful the real thing would be, but they don't know how to build it yet.
The future is already here:
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/62847/?page=1
Here's the scenario: After signing up online, you receive a kit in the mail. In your home, you provide a saliva sample in the supplied cup and ship it off to a lab. For a few hundred dollars, much of your genome is sequenced, and the company places it on a website. It's then linked to your complete medical history, also online.
At this point, the company says, you can learn about your predispositions to diseases, conditions for which you carry a recessive gene, and genealogical information. The website offers medical advice, along with advertisements for potentially useful products and services. You can even communicate with people with similar genetic characteristics, making "friends" and forming "groups."
That seems to be the plan of a Silicon Valley start-up, 23andMe, named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes that hold your genome. Google, Genentech, and venture capital firms have invested at least $10 million in 23andMe. Its founder recently married one of Google's founders. Ms. Dyson is also an investor and board member -- something that didn't come up during her interview.
I hope the idiotic promotion of google all over the internerds will stop about now.
Wow. I think some people don't understand the difference between sending in your cells for DNA analysis (as above) and a 3D body "search" application. They're not even in the same continent of applications, except that the 3D body search might be even cooler if it could zoom down to see your chromosomes with actual data -- but that's not even on the horizon yet.
Growing an accurate virtual 3D human from a real DNA sample for purposes of "body search" is 50-100 years away -- not in my lifetime.