This past Friday, Google unveiled the latest in a line of ambitious and somewhat confounding health programs. Its got everything you would want from a big Google project: its big, brash, a little scary, and completely oblivious to how anyone might take it the wrong way. Already, writers have described Baseline as Googles quest to build a perfect human, implying ethical concerns before the process has even begun. Most biomarker research is still focused on finding early warning signs of a disease — a classic example would be a protein that tips off doctors to a disease before symptoms manifest — but researchers are increasingly interested in projects like Baseline that would help to better understand the healthy body.
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