MetaMed

MetaMed Research was a medical consulting firm aiming to provide high-end personalized medical research services. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Vassar (previously of the Singularity Institute),Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa), and Zvi Mowshowitz, with startup funding from Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. Metamed stated that its researchers were drawn from top universities, as well as technology companies such as Google.

Concept

Vassar founded MetaMed to apply the principles of rationality training, as taught by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his website LessWrong, to medicine, having left Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute to do so:

Services

MetaMed was intended to provide an alternative to "typical one-size-fits-all healthcare". To this end, 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 and data from information experts.