by Chip Walter
The dinner was easygoing enough. At the Pages’, there were generally no fancy preparations or elaborate meals. Those convened included Page and Maris, Levinson and Brin, the kids and Lucy, Page’s wife, plus a longtime Google associate, Salar Kamangar, who was running YouTube at the time. After dinner, everyone got down to kicking around the Big Idea. At this point Levinson still didn’t know that anyone was interested in him actually heading up the new venture. As far as he was concerned, they were all there having a nice chat and running a few hypotheses up the flagpole. Page quickly laid out all the thinking he and Maris had discussed. What did Levinson think? Was this a business that had any chance of working?
Levinson proceeded to explain that there were a million reasons why eliminating aging was just about impossible. And why it would therefore make little sense to build a business around it. He wasn’t trying to be argumentative or difficult, you understand, but, at least from his scientific viewpoint, why sugarcoat the truth? Aging was an unbelievably complex biological problem. And figuring out why we age—let alone how we age, let alone how to stop aging—well, you didn’t have to be a molecular biologist to see that on a scale of difficulty from one to 10, this was a 20. And because Levinson was a molecular biologist, he put it pretty unequivocally that a business like this probably wouldn’t stand a chance.
First, there was the issue of the FDA not considering aging a disease. Second, launching a company would demand starting from scratch, because that was basically where the science truly stood. You could work 10, 25—who knew, maybe 100 years—and then you might still conclude the whole business was for naught. Finally, it would be outrageously expensive. The unvarnished truth was you could spend a helluva lot of time, effort, money, and human capital on the problem and every bit of it could go up in a great plume of black smoke.
Page patiently listened to everything Levinson laid out, and then he looked at him and said, as matter-of-fact as pie, “I don’t find any of those arguments compelling.” What if, Page said, we had all the time and money and resources we needed? What if we could really dig in and solve the problem, do whatever it takes? Then, tell me why this is a bad idea.
“Well,” said Levinson, “when you put it that way, I really can’t.”
And here Page delivered the coup de grâce, the surprise Levinson hadn’t seen coming. “Then, will you do it?”
It was a rare thing for Art Levinson to make a snap judgment, but how could he say no to this? The whole question was at the very heart of human happiness. It ranked up there with the top two or three most important challenges he could imagine. If you solved aging, it would change every aspect of human endeavor. And he was looking at one of the most exquisitely complex biological problems ever. He once said that he had always been attached to mystery. Well, here was just about the juiciest mystery of them all, and he was being given carte blanche to hunt it down.
7 | LEVINSON
To be perfectly clear, there had been two meetings, not one, when Art Levinson made his October pilgrimages to Larry Page’s house in 2012. There was the first one on October 18, in which Page laid out the Big Idea, and the second, which focused more on getting down to the business of making the new company a reality. That came on October 30, the night before the dead come out to show themselves. If there was any irony in that, no one mentioned it.
The group at the meeting worked well together. Levinson and Page in particular liked one another; anyone could see the similarities between them. Both were quiet, almost shy, and very focused. Levinson was famous for asking penetrating questions—something Page excelled at too. He also liked to go back to first principles and sweep away any prior, preconceived thinking in the face of a new challenge.
Following their second meeting, Levinson headed back home to the Bay Area. It was windy, cool, and dark—a time for reflection. What really was at stake here? Well, first was the bald, titanic question of the Ultimate Problem. Death. No pressure there. How strange the twists and turns of life could be, and how ironic to suddenly find himself face-to-face with problems that had haunted and fascinated him since childhood.
If there were any central themes in Art Levinson’s life, they probably boiled down to two things: curiosity and death. Curiosity was celebrated. Death, on the other hand, was not looked upon so kindly. Levinson’s parents lived in a tiny section of northeast Seattle called Hawthorne Hills. His father, Sol, was a prosperous doctor. When Levinson was maybe five or six, the family would often return home on weekend afternoons following a trip into the city to run errands, pick up groceries, and whatnot. Each time, he noticed a big hill that rose between Seattle and home, and right there among all the houses on this hill laid a wide swath of green.
That was strange. Why this big green field in the middle of all the houses? So from the back seat of the car, he would point out the green patch, and ask his parents what it was. Silence…long and deafening. And then they would drive on home. One time his mother, Malvina, started to answer, but Levinson’s father, who was normally pretty warm and approachable, barked, “We are not going to talk about that!”
Still, on subsequent trips, Levinson, mesmerized by the mystery, persisted and finally one day his mother told him the answer. It was a cemetery. Levinson’s father was not happy with that revelation. Death was something to be avoided at all times, especially if one was a doctor whose job was to keep people from dying. In fact, Dr. Sol Levinson so despised The End that he never signed a single death certificate. Not one! An astounding feat for an M.D.
Levinson never thought much about it as a kid, but later he wondered if little episodes like those with his parents reinforced a subconscious message that the specter of death was always there, even if any admission of it was to be avoided at all costs.
But truthfully, it probably wasn’t comments like these that made young Art feel the insistent passage of time and life. It was death itself. His mother had lost an older brother, Norman, as a young man. And then, about nine years after telling Art about the cemetery, his mother died of the same disease, a rare inflammatory autoimmune disease that slowly destroys the kidneys. She was 35. Levinson was 14.
Eleven years after that, Levinson’s father died of a heart attack, as men in those days often did. Sol didn’t feel well one day in May 1975, and told Art’s younger sister he needed to take a day off. It was the first time he ever took a sick day. Then he took another one, and died.
When Levinson was around seven, something else struck him about death and dying. It came to him by way of his uncle Howard, his father’s younger brother and one of the more lovable characters in his life. A few years earlier, Uncle Howard had begun sending him books every week or two. Usually Art passed on the novels and history, but he devoured the geography and science and anything about the future. One day, a particularly special box arrived. It contained The World Almanac, page after page of tables and trivia and statistics. The population of New York City, how much wheat was grown and shipped in Russia in 1958, rainfall in Arizona, geography, populations, rivers, stars, the planets. Sweet bliss!
While Levinson was poring through the columns of data, he noticed a startling piece of information. If you lived to age 80, it said, then age eight was the best time in all of your life to be alive, statistically speaking—because after that, the chances of dying did nothing but rapidly increase. He saw it right there in the tables. Once a human being got past the danger of being wiped out in childbirth or by some horrible disease early in life, you hit this sweet spot when you and death were least likely to cross paths.
This was not good news to young Art. It made enjoying the idea of celebrating his seventh birthday awfully difficult, because that would naturally lead to an eighth, at which point the inevitable decline toward death would begin! He knew right then how much he didn’t care for death. When he lost his mother, and then his father, he knew it even more.
* * *
—
IN 1968, LEVINSON MATRICULATED to the University of Washington,
just down the road from Hawthorne Hills in Seattle. He became a biology major, figuring he would become a doctor like his father. But truthfully, he wasn’t enjoying it much. One day, he came across a book cowritten by two astronomers: a young Carl Sagan and a Russian scientist named I. S. Shklovskii. The book was called Intelligent Life in the Universe. When Levinson read it, he immediately saw biology in an entirely new light. It didn’t have to be about dissecting rats or mitosis or chlorophyll. It could be about chemistry and DNA, the structure of genes and the complex ways those interactions created, or unraveled, a human being.
In no time he finished the book, and then the first day of his junior year he switched his major to molecular biology. Or more accurately, because the university didn’t have a molecular biology program in those days, he fashioned one of his own, adding classes in physics and molecular biology and advanced genetics to his docket. He wanted to be one of those scientists—the kind that got way, way down into the tiniest particulars of biological systems to figure out how they work.
Two years later, Levinson graduated from the University of Washington. By 1977, he had earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in biochemistry, and in time headed back west to do postdoctoral work at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).
By now, Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop had arrived at UCSF from the National Institutes of Health. In 1989, both would be awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology for essentially figuring out how normal cells transform themselves into cancer cells. Levinson was fascinated by the work Bishop and Varmus were doing. They loved exploring the noisy molecular stuff, from retroviruses and reverse transcriptase to viral DNA and gene regulation, and he did too. Soon he joined them as a postdoctoral student, where he studied the mysteries and origins of different cancers.
Unfortunately, in the academic world, grants for postdocs last only so long, and as 1980 rolled around, Levinson found himself facing a dilemma. His plan had been to land at MIT or some nice Ivy League school like Harvard, conduct some interesting research, and write the sort of peer-reviewed papers that would ascend him up the scientific food chain. Who could say, maybe he would pull a few biological rabbits out of his hat and change the face of cancer?
But he had a problem. Rita, his new wife, needed to complete her last year in computer science at Berkeley. That was when he ran into Herb Boyer and landed the job at Genentech.
The big breakthrough that led to Genentech had come in 1972, at a meeting in Hawaii over sandwiches, when Boyer (who was then working at UCSF) and Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen discovered a way to snip sections of DNA from one organism and recombine them with another, something that up until then could only happen in the natural world. This meant that a simple bacterium—Escherichia coli, for example—could be hijacked to grow specific proteins, like insulin or human growth hormone, in large quantities as the organism itself multiplied.
That discovery revolutionized the biological and pharmaceutical worlds, creating not only a new field—biotechnology—but also an entirely new form of evolution: one driven by human technology, not the ancient and random interactions of natural selection. Until that time, hormones like insulin had to be painstakingly drawn from other animals like pigs, not a simple or cheap process. Now they could be created artificially, and in huge amounts. It was a remarkable innovation. If not for the advance of recombinant DNA, thousands of drugs that billions of people today take to help control their diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s, or arthritis would be nothing more than a wispy dream.
When Boyer hired Levinson to join the small but growing ranks of Genentech’s other bench scientists, his job was to see what secrets he could pry out of life’s genetic riddles. In particular Boyer suggested Levinson spend half of his time on the gene incompatibility expression problem.
“And what about the other half?”
“Just make yourself useful,” Boyer said.
The gene incompatibility expression problem was indeed thorny, and had been frustrating Genentech researchers for some time. It was related to hepatitis B, a disease that afflicted billions of people. Over time it destroyed their livers, and eventually, the rest of their bodies. An effective vaccine, if it could be created, would save millions of lives. Genentech was struggling to use recombinant DNA to create large batches of hep B vaccine, something that would deliver a major breakthrough in the treatment.
The standard approach for growing a protein in 1980 was to use Boyer and Cohen’s approach: Insert it into the E. coli bacteria, and then place it in large fermenters where the bacteria would create millions more copies of the desired protein. This had worked with insulin, but it wasn’t working with hep B, and no one could understand why. The research team would insert the hep B virus into the E. coli, but the bacteria, for reasons no one could fathom, would promptly turn itself and the virus into glue, which naturally destroyed any chance of a successful vaccine.
Levinson, having spent most of his time in cancer biology, where mammals were used in research, thought: Why not replace the E. coli with cells from mammals—hamsters, for example? And when he did, it worked! The reason was simple. The hepatitis virus and mammalian cells had, unlike the E. coli, been evolving together for millions of years; in fact, they were on the most intimate of terms. So now, when the vaccine proteins entered the mammal cells, they were accepted and duplicated like a house on fire.
When Levinson told the manufacturing department about his new method, they dismissed it out of hand. After all, everyone knew that E. coli was the one and only cost-effective way to mass-produce proteins. Nevertheless, Levinson persisted. “Try it,” he said.
“We’ll run some numbers and get back to you.” A week later, they returned with their verdict: It’s too expensive.
Levinson persisted some more. “Can you show me the math?”
“Trust us. We’ve been very thorough, and it can’t be done.” Levinson: “Show me the math…please.”
The bean counters shared the math, reluctantly. Levinson went away and pored through it all, including the underlying assumptions, and confirmed his suspicions: They were wrong. Way wrong. Orders of magnitude wrong.
Diplomatically, he told them so. Of course, they had to go back and forth a few times before the manufacturing department saw the light, which was suddenly very bright and promising because the new vaccine wasn’t just pretty good, it was marvelous! Even today, flu vaccines are 70 percent effective in a good year, and sometimes as low as 30 or 40 percent. But this vaccine was at least 95 percent effective. It stopped the disease in its biological tracks! Not only that, the new method improved Genentech’s yield tenfold and cut costs. The approach revolutionized biotech manufacturing and became the standard for cloning proteins in the pharmaceutical industry. Herb Boyer later told me that not many people understood how pivotal Levinson’s discovery was. He called it one of the most important breakthroughs in biotechnology, ever.
At the time, Levinson was 31 years old.
* * *
—
AFTER THAT, LEVINSON never really looked back—although it wasn’t his intention to someday run an entire company, even Genentech. He preferred science but found himself pulled more and more into the management side of the company, and was quickly run up the corporate ladder. In 1989, he became Genentech’s vice president of research technology; a year later, he was named vice president of research, then senior vice president of research and development in 1993. In 1995, with Boyer’s support on the board, Levinson became Genentech’s president and chief executive officer, and in 1999 he took on the chairmanship.
Under his watch, the company developed multiple genetically engineered pharmaceuticals: real breakthroughs like Herceptin for breast cancer; Tarceva, to treat lung and pancreatic cancer; Esbriet, an anti–pulmonary fibrosis drug; and Cotellic for melanoma. Meanwhile, Genentech’s stock just kept going up.
By 2009, though, Genentech had been folded into Roche, a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, after Levinson arranged a $46.8 billion merger.
He was ready to move on. So he began planning a nice early retirement to spend more time with Rita, maybe play a little tennis now and again, and dial back his board memberships, except for his duties as Apple chairman. It was all good.
And then he gets the call from Google Ventures. Out of nowhere he finds himself facing one of the greatest scientific mysteries ever. It was as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Ahem. Would you care to save a few million lives, and utterly transform the course of human history?”
8 | KURZWEIL
It was still winter in 2012 when Ray Kurzweil decided to send an early manuscript of his latest book, How to Create a Mind, to Larry Page. The book described Kurzweil’s methods for developing human-level artificial intelligence, one of his great obsessions. Now that the book was complete, he was seeking funds to launch a company that could build on it. That was often the way it worked with Kurzweil. He hatched ideas, honed them in speeches and interviews, and wrote books about them. Sometimes, the books became businesses.
Page enjoyed the manuscript, and that summer it eventually led Kurzweil to Bill Maris and Google Ventures at just about the same time Maris was kicking around his ideas about some sort of longevity company—the one that would eventually bring Art Levinson into the fold. Maris found Kurzweil’s thinking about almost everything flat-out inspiring, but he particularly liked his thoughts on longevity. Kurzweil was arguably the first mainstream thinker to make logical, scientific arguments for living radically long—so when the two met and talked, they reinforced one another’s common interests.
“You really ought to try to solve this death thing,” Kurzweil remembers saying to Maris.
