Former Google life sciences unit renames itself Verily

Yet, the new name may mean that customers can trust Verily team and their research, if Google delivers its promises.

With these changes, Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page hopes company officials would be free to focus on growing more efficiently its core operations with lesser distractions.

Verily, which now falls under the Alphabet umbrella, will be an independent company that focuses on using “technology to better understand health, as well as prevent, detect and manage disease”.

For those rusty on their Shakespeare, verily is an archaic English word meaning truly or truthfully-or forsooth, if you’d like to stick to the vintage-language menu.

“Only through the truth are we going to defeat Mother Nature”, added Conrad.

Branding experts, however, said that in our times the antiquated new moniker could be associated with the Bible alone. “The challenge for them is to try to move away from the heavy-handed quality attached to Verily from association with the scripture – due to everything that’s happening in our world right now”. In fact, the company even has a staff philosopher.

Verily evolved out of a Google-designed contact lens for diabetics that continuously monitors glucose in tears. A textbook use of this technology is Google’s Baseline Study (already underway) to collect enough data to understand exactly what a “healthy” patient looks like in order to be able to spot, early on, the deterioration of one’s health. Verily was part of Google X, the Internet giant’s secretive experimental laboratory.

With the name change, the team has also organized itself into four groups (hardware, software, clinical, and research) and begun to focus in particular on heart disease and diabetes.

For all of Verily’s grand ambitions, Conrad hinted at caution, if not humility, paraphrasing Clarence Darrow, the great lawyer and civil libertarian: “We don’t claim to know what other ignorant men are sure of”.