Question of the Fortnight Will Google Alphabet make you live longer?

? The surprise restructuring of Google may lead to medical breakthroughs

‘how can I live longer?’ into Google and you’ll get 245 million results, many of them linking to websites with dubious suggestions for prolonging your life. That approach won’t add years to your life, but the recent creation of Alphabet may.

Alphabet is Google’s new parent company. It sits at the head of a restructured organisation designed to give increased freedom to the smaller, more experimental parts of the business. Writing on the Alphabet website ( https://abc.xyz), Larry Page (who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin) admits these projects may seem “speculative or even strange”. But he’s confident these ‘alpha’ bets (hence the name) will pay off long term, both in terms of the company’s financial fortunes and the improvement in people’s lives.

The most important thing to know about the change is that it won’t affect your everyday use of Google. The company wants to continue to optimise the money it makes from advertising, so it won’t neglect the services these ads appear on – search, Gmail, Youtube and so on.

But fast-forward several years, and you may start to see benefits from this restructuring. That’s because Alphabet should allow Google’s more adventurous projects to flourish. Page calls these ‘moon shots’, referring to John F Kennedy’s ambition of sending a man to the Moon. In 1962 Kennedy famously said: “We choose to go to the moon… not because it is easy, but because it is hard”. Page is less eloquent, though just as determined: “We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super-excited about”.

What’s all this got to do with living longer? Well, one of Google’s moon shots is Calico ( www.calicolabs.com), a biotech company dedicated to extending the human lifespan. It conducts research into age-related diseases and recently teamed up with Ancestrydna ( http://dna. ancestry.com) to examine why some people’s genes help them live longer.

Another part of Google that could thrive is the Life Sciences division of Google X, a top-secret experimental laboratory. It has already made a ‘smart’ contact lens that measures the glucose level of people with diabetes, and is developing the Liftware spoon ( www.liftware.com), which reduces tremors as Parkinson’s patients eat food. Independent from the big money-making parts of Google, Calico and Google X should be able to conduct more radical work.

This approach is part of a strategy that Page and Brin hope will make Google a different type of company –

one that sets out to improve humanity, not just accumulate vast amounts of money. You can see this in some of their other moon shots, such as the development of drones to provide supplies to areas hit by natural disasters.

Many people doubt the sincerity of Google’s founders. They say that the company’s original ‘don’t be evil’ motto has been undermined by the aggressive accumulation of users’ personal information in order to show targeted adverts.

Google would argue that the more cash they make from advertising, the more they can invest in innovation. From any other company, that claim would be scoffed at. You might be forgiven for doubting not only the company’s intentions, but also its capacity to invent life-changing technology.

But Google’s track record is so impressive that it’s tempting to give them the benefit of the doubt. From search to Youtube, from Android to Chrome, Google has defined how we use the web. Maybe it could also help us use the web for longer too.