Among Calico's first hires was Cynthia Kenyon, now its vice president of aging research, who 20 years ago showed that altering a single DNA letter in a laboratory roundworm made it live six weeks instead of three.

Google's founders created an academic-­biotech hybrid they call an R and D company to follow up on such clues, providing nearly unlimited funding to a group of top researchers. Calico has hired stars like artificial-intelligence specialist Daphne Koller. With equal contributions from Google's parent company, Alphabet, and the drug company AbbVie, it has $1.5 billion in the bank

Calico is an elite university research group housed within a corporate bunker, doing mostly basic science. It has more than 100 employees and has assembled a Noah's ark of yeast, worms, and more exotic creatures like the naked mole rats, which are kept at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, about 30 miles from Calico's South San Francisco headquarters.