Google is taking on death itself with Calico, a new company charged with extending the human life span.

The initiative, announced in a Time cover story, will be run by Arthur Levinson, former CEO of Genentech, who is also an investor and the chairman of Apple. In an interview with Time, Google CEO Larry Page characterized Calico as a moonshot, along the lines of Google's self-driven cars. "It takes 10 or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real," Page explained. "Health care is certainly one of those areas. We should shoot for the things that are really, really important, so 10 or 20 years from now we have those things done.”

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Google has attempted to address health care before with Google Health, an effort to digitize personal health record services, that was shuttered in 2011. Beyond its ambitious goal to "improve millions of lives," Google and Page were short on specifics about what Calico will actually do. The idea garnered unprecedented praise from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who noted in a press release, “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art[hur Levinson] is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”

Image: Getty, Justin Sullivan