Free tasty food, brightly coloured bicycles and high salaries are well-known hallmarks of the Googleplex—Google’s famed headquarters in Mountain View, California. But it was not these perks that led cardiologist Jessica Mega to pause her thriving academic career at Harvard Medical School to become the chief medical officer of the company’s life-sciences team. She was lured by the ambitions of the effort, soon to be incorporated under Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Nurtured by Google’s expertise in data analytics and engineering, the biology team is expected to create miniaturized electronic devices and to use these and other means to collect and analyse more health data, more continuously, than is possible today.