Sergey Brin started to change the world for the first time in 1995, when he was 21 years old. Fourteen years later, he looks about to do it all over again.
When the Stamford researcher working on his doctorate got together with fellow student Larry Page, Google was born. The internet search engine is now so powerful that it is a household name on every continent and, arguably, the most powerful media organisation in the world. Last week, Brin, who now lives in a big house on the southern peninsula of San Francisco, announced he is investing unspecified millions of the profits in a research programme into Parkinson’s disease.
This has been welcomed by the scientific community as having the potential to revolutionise medical research.
It is not just money that Brin is bringing to the Parkinson’s research project — it’s a way of thinking about the world which has been pioneered by Google. Rather than being controlled by doctors in laboratories, and therefore limited by numbers and reliant on the time and input of a few researchers, it is being conducted through the internet. Current plans are to analyse the DNA of 10 000 Parkinson’s sufferers, who will then fill out web-based questionnaires about their lives and symptoms, becoming an internet community of their own.
The aim is to discover which lifestyle and genetic factors contribute to the disease. Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, a Massachusetts-based research centre, describes the approach as “a Googley thing to do”. Catherine Paddock, a doctor writing for the American website Medical News Today, considers the approach may bring about “a social revolution in how research is done and who owns it”.
Just a few of days after the plan was announced, it is inspiring fierce debate. Scepticism has been provoked by the fact that the company carrying out the Parkinson’s research, 23andMe (named after the 23 chromosome pairs every human has), is co-owned and co-managed by Sergey Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki. Although Brin is largely financing the research, there is the potential for the company to make a profit by selling the results to drugs companies.
Writing on her blog, Wojcicki explains their aim: “Our approach is new because it leverages the web to bring people together from all over the globe who are willing to share information about their own health experiences [phenotype], which is then combined with their genetic profile [genotype].”
Rival genetic research firms claim the approach can result in poor-quality data because it is reliant on amateurs reporting on themselves.
But 23andMe is not his only family connection to the enterprise. Last year, the Google founder discovered that the make up of his DNA — he has a genetic mutation — means he has a 50/50 chance of developing Parkinson’s.
His mother also had the mutation, and developed Parkinson’s, and he has already announced that he plans to have his four-month-old son tested to see whether he has inherited the trait. Brin is facing the discovery with the confidence of a self-made billionaire, but tempered by the down-to-earth attitude reported by colleagues throughout his career. “I give it a 50/50 shot of medicine catching up to be able to deal with it,” he said last week. Is Brin effectively going to be defeat Parkinson’s with hard cash?
Turning medical research on its head is just one of Brin’s current projects. At the same time as being involved, as part of a triumvirate with co-founders Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt, with the day-to-day running of Google, his expansion plans stretch from literature — Google has hopes of digitising every book ever published — into outer space.
He is one of the founder members of the Orbital Mission Explorers Circle, set up by the space tourism company Space Adventures, which has cost him $5-million in deposit, while Google has sponsored a competition to land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. “I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space,” he said last summer.
This is no doubt something he has inherited from his mother Eugenia, a scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre near Washington DC, and his father Michael, who only became a professor of mathematics because plans to study astronomy were thwarted by the university admissions policies in the USSR of the early 1970s, which discriminated against Jewish people.
A senior manager who has recently left Google tells me that Brin is also passionate about the environment. “Energy is going to be a big deal for him,” he says. “He looks at how traditional business is done and it frustrates the hell out of him.”
This has led not just to his decision to upgrade his Toyota Prius to the more eco-friendly Tesla Roadster, an electric vehicle with a range of 350km, but also to him making an investment of at least $10-million in the company that is being hailed as the future of the motor industry.
Brin was born in Moscow in August 1973. His first five years were spent in a 100 square metre in Moscow shared with his grandmother, although his parents recall that he spent at least four hours a day outside, no matter what the weather. In 1977, Michael Brin travelled to Warsaw for a mathematics conference, which brought together academics from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and came back convinced of the opportunities for his family in the West.
The following year, he applied for exit visas from the Soviet Union for the family and after several tense months, during which Michael was fired from his job and Eugenia asked to leave hers, they were granted permission to leave.
Their route to New York took the family first to Vienna and then to Paris, but by the end of 1979, they had settled in Maryland, bought a Ford and Sergey had started at the local Montessori school.
“I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he says. “I could grow at my own pace.” From there, he moved to the local high school and then to the University of Maryland.
All this time, Brin was considered to be a bright boy by his teachers, but contemporaries do not remember him as particularly outstanding. On graduating, however, he won a place to study for a PhD in mathematics at Stanford, a private research university in California with a fearsome reputation, and in 1995, he was assigned to show around a new student named Larry Page.
A Google executive, who has asked not to be named because he regards Brin as “a very private person”, says that over the next days, the two students argued and talked and debated and they haven’t stopped since. The idea for Google, which grew from these discussions, was based on the concept in academia that the number of times a research paper was cited by other academics provided a good guide to its importance.
By applying this reasoning to web pages, so that those most often linked to other websites should come highest in the search rankings, they came up with the plan for Google.
What followed is well known to fans of technology and entrepreneurship. From the $100 000 cheque written by the Sun Systems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, payable to Google, a company which did not yet exist; to the garage they rented as their first office, from Susan Wojcicki (now Brin’s sister-in-law), at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park; to the mass of awards that followed; to the partnership with internet service provider America Online; to the flotation on Wall Street in August 2004.
Today, Brin sits in 26th place on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people, with a fortune of $12-billion. Eric Schmidt, who was brought in as CEO of the company in 2001, says 98% of their revenue comes from advertising. The search engine, email service and other innovations, such as Google Maps, are, in commercial terms, just methods of attracting people to the site.
Brin is, of course, no more a simple advertising man than he is a simple technical pioneer. Through his external investments and by the ever-adaptable nature of Google, Brin turns private passions into projects with real momentum. But, medical research, the private jet and space exploration aside, does he enjoy his money?
“From my parents I certainly learnt to be frugal,” Brin has said. “I still look at prices. I try to force myself to do this less, not to be so frugal.” He shops at Costco, a wholesale shop, and enjoys cooking. A friend said last week that, unlike other Silicon Valley tycoons, the decidedly un-nerdy Brin spends a lot of his downtime outside, as did the five-year-old in Moscow. Only these days, it’s “kitesurfing, windsurfing, diving, rollerblading, bike riding and skiing — he’s a very keen skier”. Brin’s attitude to these athletic pursuits is described as “competitive in a friendly way”.
It would be tempting to say that the Earth is Brin’s playground, but he has already told us that he intends to fly far higher than that. – guardian.co.uk