By the time Human Longevity, Inc.’s Face Project was under way, the company’s business plan had been well set. The idea wasn’t to simply aggregate genetic information; these days, anyone could do that. No, HLI would gather genetic information with an accuracy and depth that would reveal nothing less than how the great gears of evolution constructed both the human species and the individual known as “you.”
The Face Project was only one of many undertakings that Venter had simmering throughout the corridors at HLI. Also included were a series of research collaborations with Genentech, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and King’s College London. The King’s College connection allowed HLI to get its hands on the genomes and microbiomes of 2,000 twins. Deals were made with cancer institutes and insurance companies from the United Kingdom to South Africa. Within two years, the company had grown to 200 employees in San Diego and Silicon Valley. Venter hired an assortment of top-rung executives, including Brad Perkins, former chief strategy and innovations officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as chief medical officer; Bill Biggs to handle genomic sequencing; and, eventually, Ken Bloom as president.
Biggs had been setting up sequencing labs for 20 years, basically since they existed. His name befitted him. He was a big man with graying blond hair that flopped over his high forehead, partial to loose slacks and Hawaiian shirts. Bloom had originally come into HLI to head its immunotherapy division, but took on the role of president in early 2016. He was an affable, articulate man who had spent years in the academic world, then created a health care company later bought by GE Healthcare, where he had spent several years as chief medical officer.
Biggs’s work would be especially important, because Venter had immediately bought two Illumina HiSeq X Ten Sequencing Systems (the grandchildren of Hunkapiller’s DNA sequencers from the HGP days), with three more in the pipeline. Venter’s goal was to initially sequence 2,000 human genomes a month, but accelerate to 40,000 by the end of the first year. By 2016, Biggs had installed 26 Illumina sequencers with the company knocking out over 700 human genomes a week: 60 terabytes of raw information and 240 terabytes after the information was analyzed. That was the equivalent content contained in 3,120,000 full-length movies a year.
Venter eventually crammed the place so full of sequencers that Biggs had to start giving them names like Obi-Wan, Leia, and R2-D2. It turned out that the staff found it easier to track mythical names for the contraptions than use random numbers. Generating these many genomes a week was what Brad Perkins liked to call “getting to scale.”
Bloom agreed. By his reckoning, HLI would need to analyze a good one million integrated genomes before it could hope to gain a really solid idea of what any human double helix could reveal. All of this was entirely consistent with Venter’s goal for HLI, but different from Calico and the SENS Research Foundation. He wasn’t shooting to attain immortality or radically extend human life—certainly not in the ways Kurzweil and de Grey had been talking about. Venter’s focus was on “extending health span” (or, as some of the gerontology wonks liked to put it, “compressing morbidity”). The goal was to get the maximum number of years of life that evolution had worked out for Homo sapiens, and to make them good ones rather than the painful, long goodbyes that marked the ends of so many lives.
Not that he was opposed to radical life extension. If Art Levinson and the researchers over at Calico could manage to create a pill that jumped human life span to a healthy few hundred years, fine by him: He’d be the first to gulp it down. On the other hand, there might be consequences if everyone did that. Venter was halfway serious when he said men might have to be castrated to ensure long-lived humans didn’t cram the planet full of people.
Either way, there was plenty of work to be done. More deals and hardware followed at HLI: high-end imaging equipment, deeper machine learning expertise, more computing power, the sequencing of the microbiome, cancer cells, and tumors—whatever Venter could get his hands on to begin peeling away the obstreperous riddles the human genome held close. Then, he would apply all of that data to tackle whatever life-killing diseases he could before they took an early hold.
At its simplest, Venter saw the enterprise as a database company faced with solving the most complex translational challenge humans had ever looked in the eye. It really was like trying to decipher an incredibly complex foreign language. If such a mystery could be unmasked, the practice of medicine would change profoundly. Doctors would stop treating symptoms and start using patients’ personal genetic information to head off disease. Every human being might not live forever, but because their ailments would be treated before symptoms emerged, they would live far better, and, therefore, far longer.
And think what an improvement that would be! After all, nearly every cancer is curable at Stage I, often at Stage II. Early detection might be the simplest cancer treatment: far easier and less painful than radiation or chemotherapy or surgery. Or what if you knew in your 20s that you were genetically predisposed to heart disease? Maybe you would change your lifestyle. Or take some preventative drug. Or, very possibly, thanks to all of those new insights about the genome, use Crispr to rearrange a few of your genes to eliminate the problem entirely, before it became a problem. With technology like this, science could have saved the lives of people like John Venter, Fredric Kurzweil, and Sol Levinson.
This was all easier said than done, of course. Back in the early, euphoric days of the Human Genome Project, scientists had become so excited about the huge advance it represented that everyone forgot that sequencing the genome was not the same as comprehending it. Right now, science understood 2 percent of all those laddered spirals. Of the 33,000 specific genes that did the work of creating a human being, 32,340 were then unknown: pregnant with information, but a black hole bigger than the Messier 87 galaxy (and that was the biggest one in the known universe). You could imagine it was something like an old-world map from the age of discovery where some frustrated cartographer had scratched out a few outlines of continental coasts and then, inside of large white spaces beyond, scribbled the words “Here be dragons.”
But if Human Longevity, Inc., could fill in the blanks, then the bald spots on the great genomic map would disappear, and every bit of that information would be available for license to anyone who wanted it. And if HLI also chose to develop any new drugs or treatments of its own, then there was that possibility too. Alliances could always be arranged. But first things first: Gather hundreds of thousands of human genomes, and then ransack the mountains of data to decipher what it all meant. That was the ticket.
TO ACCOMPLISH IMPRESSIVE FEATS such as this, HLI needed two kinds of information: high-resolution sequencing of people’s individual genomes, as well as deep dives into each patient’s personal and medical history. Collectively, this is known as phenotypic data.
Phenotypic data synced a patient’s genome with the real world of his or her health and background. Was the person 20 years old or 60? Were they Olympic specimens, or did they have heart problems and arthritis? How tall were they? What did they eat? Were they obese or slim? Where did they come from and what was the health of their parents and siblings like? Did they have any diseases? Did their parents? Combining genomic and phenotypic information created what was known as an “integrated genome,” because it revealed both sides of the same human coin, and helped to match what you experienced in life with the details of your DNA.
HLI’s massive, integrated genome enterprise was Sabatini’s Face Project all over again, writ large. That project had taken eight mind-searing months of unremitting machine learning. We broke the Cloud! And now Venter wanted to do the same thing, top to bottom, with hundreds of thousands of human genomes.
This idea went way back with Venter. One day, when we were talking in his HLI office, he told me in his inimitable way that it wasn’t as though creating the company had been “some kind of brain fart.” As far back as 18 years earlier, he had told the science journalist James Shreeve, “We’re going to be on the forefront of everything. We’re going to need to build the fastest computer in the world, with data production orders of magnitude bigger than anything else. We’re thinking on a different scale. Just doing the human genome and stopping there is way short of what can be accomplished.”
In the Venterian mind, health, aging, disease, and the genome were all variations on the same theme. Each revealed the other. It was just that it had taken a decade and a half for the world’s computing software to catch up. The need and the will had been there, but not certain resources—the technology and money. At last these had emerged too, so now it was time to succeed. And in his mind, the genome was the key: the wellspring of all human insight.
And so HLI’s machines had begun cranking out the trillions and trillions of bits of data that had for so long been hiding up evolution’s long and hoary sleeves. And, at last, they were unmasking more than a few of its stubborn secrets.