Imagine if you will that you are on a journey through time and space. A journey into your own mind, a ….wait. It’s not Friday, and it’s also not JAM (that’s Joints After Midnight) time yet. OK, then let’s think out loud for a second about Google Health. Inspired by an email exchange with Jacob Bastacky, a doctor who happens to have a child in the same school as mine and, more importantly, a doctor who has spent a fair time in front of an electron microscope, I present to you Google Inner Space, or, as it will be more mundanely known, (my totally unofficial version of) Google Health.
Just as you now can fly over earth like some vicarious Superman, so, with Google Inner Space (not Jacob’s favorite name, but I kinda like it), you can fly inside of the very molecules which surround you – nay, inside of *our* very molecules. Want to see a map of a cancerous prostrate? Want to surf through an aorta, or pump through an adrenal gland? With Google Inner Space, you can.
All is information. And that includes information about who we are at the atomic, molecular, cellular, and organic level. This information can and will be displayed to you. Then we can tag, share, mix, and rip it. At least, it’d be cool if we could. What do you think, Adam?
Intruiging idea…had a similar thought a while back after watching ‘powers of ten’ a couple of times…makes sense to be able to go the other way in Google Earth and alike (unfortunately ‘powers of ten’ has since been removed from youtube, but I found this alternative ;).
I like it. Just one problem: Where are they going to display the ads? 😉
I heard about this a little over a year ago. The concept was presented as a potential “DNA Search Engine”. The idea is very similar to yours and we thought Google would be the first to approach this. We speculated because Sergey Brin (based on one of his Orkut community memberships) is a big fan of Nanotechnology. Overall, it would be about (call it, for example) googleinnerspacebot traveling through your body to find information at the molecular level, that would then be sent to a repository for indexing purposes. Then based on some type of algorithms, it would allow you to search information about your health. You could also create alarms that would both page you (via SMS, email, etc.) and your doctor if it finds anything unusual that would require immediate attention. And you can imagine the many more ideas that can come to mind in this imaginary concept….
Either way, they question that I asked myself was… If this was something to exist some time in the future, what in the world will pharmaceutical companies do??? Would it sent many to crash and burn? What about the entire medical industry – what could end up as a concequence? Would human beings live to 150? What about animals too?
Loved the post, John… happy to engage on this topic. I find it fascinating!
Saludos,
Nacho Hernandez
Will we need to shrink ourselves very tiny along with a submarine and inject ourselves into it to explore??
Can not wait.
Cheers
Hi John,
I am intrigued about what a ‘cancerous prostrate’ looks like.