Google has set out to complete a science project aimed at showing what a perfectly healthy human body should be.
The project, called Baseline Study, was created by Google X, the search giant's research section, and involves collecting medical data from volunteers to build a large database of records, according to The Verge. The first round of data will be collected anonymously from 175 people, and will focus on genetic and molecular information.
The goal for the project is to provide a huge amount of data for medical professionals to help them detect and treat cancer, heart disease and other major health problems earlier. The project is also aimed at helping these professionals find patterns and trends in human health, which puts the focus of medicine more on preventing illnesses from taking place rather than coming up with a cure.
Dr. Andrew Conrad, a molecular biologist who joined Google X in March 2013, is running Baseline and has put together a team of between 70 and 100 experts in physiology, optics, biochemistry, imaging, molecular biology and other fields, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"With any complex system, the notion has always been there to proactively address problems," Conrad said. "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."
New diagnostic tools will be used to collect hundreds of samples, and there will be no restrictions for certain diseases. Afterwards, Google will look for patterns, also called "biomarkers" in the information so that medical researchers can use the biomarkers to find diseases earlier.
The development of Baseline has been possible because of the decreasing cost of collecting genetic and molecular data. Sequencing participants' genomes and their parents' genetic history use to cost $100 million, but now it only costs around $1,000. Data will also be collected on how participants metabolize food, nutrients and drugs, how chemical reactions change the behavior of their genes, and how fast their hearts beat under stress, The Verge reported.
While the project has raised concerns about privacy, Google clarified that the information will be anonymous when they receive it and that the data should not be shared with insurance companies.
"Google will not be allowed free rein to do whatever it wants with this data," said Dr. Sam Gambhir, a Stanford doctor who has been working with Google for over a year.
Conrad said the new information that will be collected in the project will be of great help to medicine, and that Baseline fits Google's original mission of gathering the world's information and making it so it can be used and accessed by anyone in the world, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"We shouldn't put a slash through our mission statement and say that health care is excluded," he added.
