Google’s stated goal in 2013 of “curing death” appeared to be little more than a questionable cover idea for Time, and the more-reasonable target of its life-extension offshoot, Calico, seems clearer a year later: It’s the search giant’s entry into Big Pharma. The drugs the company brings to market to treat geriatric diseases will likely aim more for incremental improvements than silver-bullet solutions. Immortality, at best, is a long, hard slog. From Ben Popper at the Verge, an analysis of Calico’s new development deal with pharmaceutical heavyweight AbbVie:

“Remember, Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of ‘curing death.’ CEO Larry Page, Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Google hired as its director of engineering, have all expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and the Singularity. Up until today we haven’t had a lot of detail about how Calico would pursue that goal. Page had told Time, ‘One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.’

Viewed in that light this new drug-development partnership, while ambitious and admirable, is decidedly less futuristic than what Google had previously been suggesting it would pursue.”