Googling a cure for Parkinson’s

last updated 8 January 2015

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is on a highly personal quest to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease, said Thomas Goetz in Wired. His mother, Eugenia, suffers from the neurodegenerative disorder, and in 2006, a genetic test revealed that Brin carries a gene that greatly increases his chance of developing it, too. Over the past few years, he’s donated some $50 million of his $15 billion fortune to funding Parkinson’s research. “The pace of medical research is glacial compared to what I’m used to on the Internet,” he says.

So rather than funding traditional studies conducted under the rigors of the scientific method, Brin has been pushing a more Google-like approach, supporting initiatives that sift through massive amounts of “noisy data” taken from Parkinson’s patients—employing algorithms much like a search engine does. “We could be looking lots of places and collecting lots of information. And if we see a pattern, that could lead somewhere,” he says. “Regardless of my own health, it can help my family members as well as others.”

The approach has been greeted with skepticism by the scientific establishment, but Brin sees no downside in considering alternatives. Besides, it’s his money. “Obviously, I’m somewhat unusual in the resources I can bring to bear.”