Let me Google that for you – Sergeys Investment in Parkinsons

It’s the same old story,boy co-founds of one of the most successful companies on the planet, Girl meets boy. Girl has passion for genetics and creates startup company offering genome mapping. Boy falls in love with girl. BAM, before you know it, boy has genome mapped and discovers he has a genetic mutation that predisposes him to a higher rate of Parkinson’s.

OK, maybe not an everyday story, but there is little of Sergey Brin that is everyday.

Aged 36, and worth in excess of $15 billion, Sergey brings serious leverage to anything he turns his hand to. His contributions to Parkinson’s research since he discovered his mutation have been over $50 million, which, in his words should “help to really move the needle”. However, how he plans to move that needle by his own methods may be worth more than any dollar figure.

As many of us are all too aware, traditional medical research relies on the standard scientific method: hypothesis, analysis, peer review, publication – all before we get to any form of actual implementation studies. In an age when we are becoming more and more accustomed to information and change moving as quickly as we can think it, medical research and progress, at least to those outside the laboratory, seems to be moving at an almost glacial speed. For this me-now generation that just won’t do. We want answers, well, now.

That may be unrealistic but Sergey is offering a glimmer of hope to the impatient, determined layman. In fact, he is proposing a whole new approach to science. With staggering computational power at his disposal and access (via Google) to probably the largest fluid data set in the world, Sergey has a plan.

At Stanford, whilst studying for his PHD, Sergey focused on data mining – specifically mining huge datasets. The patterns and insight that they afforded someone who was willing to look in the right way offered massive opportunities. So much so that he left University before completing the PHD and set up Google.

That, I think, proved his point.

Now, his willingness to look at data in that ‘right way’ has returned and he has the hard cash and the technical know how to do something great with it.

As Wired Magazine put it, “Brin is proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesize, and then find the patterns that lead to answers. And he has the money and the algorithms to do it.”

You may, or may not, be aware of the growing band of DIY health hackers – groups of people throughout the world who are researching their own diseases, disabilities and afflictions. With the information they gather, and the expertise they have with their own bodies, they test potential cures, remedies, processes to alleviate symptoms – right down to diet and alternative therapies. This they then groupsource via the web into a ‘bucket’ of information; Information that may provide patterns and clues to those who have the mind to explore further. This is real grassroots science, which, unsurprisingly, produces a lot of anecdotal ‘dirty data’, but it just might yield hitherto unknown clues about what causes and what can help a whole range of disease (see the next issue of Able for our DIY health hacker feature).

Sergey, maybe unwittingly is obviously of the same ilk. Not long after he first discovered he had the genetic mutation, he quickly decided to start a blog about his predicament. Rather than deal with the hassle of keeping the information private (especially difficult for such a well known figure), he craved the exchange of information. Let the data be free! From his blog; “I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to, I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g., there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson’s). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me. And, regardless of my own health, it can help my family members as well as others.”

He continued: “I feel fortunate to be in this position. Until the fountain of youth is discovered, all of us will have some conditions in our old age, only we don’t know what they will be. I have a better guess than almost anyone else for what ills may be mine—and I have decades to prepare for it.”

There is just so much data available nowadays that it is quite mind-boggling. Every time we go to Amazon and buy a book, or Tesco for some shopping, search for a cold remedy online or chuck our symptoms into the WebMD search engine just to make sure that we have more than a few minutes left to live, we are adding to a seemingly infinite pool of information. Even a few decades ago this data was outwith our grasp but with the recent explosion of computational power this can all be tracked, mined and manipulated. Can the very size and complexity of such large stores of information yield patterns that we just wouldn’t have found before – Couldn’t have seen before? Bear that in mind the next time Amazon recommends you something – it’s very similar algorithms that produce those results.

This tracking of anecdotal data isn’t a particularly new idea of course. Governments the world over have tracked things such as cold medicine purchases to try and pre-empt pandemics and so on, but it is very difficult to get the data in a real world environment. (Have you ever tried phoning a Boots the Chemist?) The virtual environment however offers instant information for analysis. It has been widely reported that Google researchers (through their Flu Trends experiment) can point to a potential flu outbreak in the US over two weeks quicker than the Center for Disease Control (CDC); an obvious gain for the ‘instantaneous’ virtual over the CDC’s more traditional methods.

What if patient histories, anecdotal stories, drug choices, eating habits, shopping habits, drinking levels, location, lifestyle and every other facet of life that makes its way online to the ‘data bucket’. What patterns could we find? What secrets would bubble to the top where we least expect it?

Traditional scientists are of course skeptical. This seems like a lot of ‘dirty data’ that, unless you know what you’re looking for, will lie like useless piles of ones and zero’s on a digital wasteland.

That may be valid, but with tens of thousands of people signing up to share their genetic, medical and anecdotal evidence with others it is fast becoming a reality. Time will tell if we can get useful data from all this but with the hope of a ‘scientific research cycle’ that takes days rather than years it is absolutely something that is set to grow and grow.

Thankfully we have Sergey, billionaire extraordinaire, data mining genius, and DIY healthcare hacker, who happens to have a predisposition to Parkinson’s, to help give it the best shot possible. Would you bet against him?