MetaMed Research was an American medical consulting firm aiming to provide
personalized medical research services. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Vassar (previously of the
Singularity Institute),
Jaan Tallinn
Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian billionaire computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/ Kazaa. Jaan Tallinn is a leading figure in the field ...
(co-founder of
Skype
Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debi ...
and
Kazaa),
Zvi Mowshowitz
Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and My Fires. H ...
,
and Nevin Freeman with startup funding from Silicon Valley investor
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in F ...
.
MetaMed stated that its researchers were drawn from top universities, as well as prominent technology companies such as Google.
Many of its principals were associated with the Rationalist movement.
Concept
Vassar founded MetaMed to apply the principles of rationality as taught by
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American decision theory and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and writer, best known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder and research ...
to medicine, having left Yudkowsky's
Singularity Institute to do so. MetaMed was intended to provide an alternative to typical healthcare by providing higher quality research.
Vassar explained,
Services
Company researchers gathered detailed medical information on each client, using this as the basis for the creation of personalized research reports for various conditions (or, in some cases, for the purpose of client performance enhancement).
It also assessed the expected value of various tests, and created maps of correlations between possible medical conditions. One aim of the company was to aid doctors with advanced
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
and data from information experts.
MetaMed's personalized medical research services were targeted at the market for
concierge medicine
Concierge medicine, also known as retainer medicine, is a relationship between a patient and a primary care physician in which the patient pays an annual fee or retainer. This may or may not be in addition to other charges. In exchange for the reta ...
, with prices ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.
Termination
By 2015, MetaMed was defunct, which Tallinn attributed to the difficulty of producing research results and limited interest from consumers.
References
{{LessWrong
Defunct health care companies of the United States
American transhumanists