Why is Roche rocking the boat? Its stake in Genentech already provides a large part of its earnings; owning all of Genentech would maximize Roche's take. But this could be a classic case of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Genentech's top scientists are already wealthy from stock options; loyalty to Levinson is mostly what's keeping them at the company, writes the In Vivo biotech blog. And Levinson, who has already been at the company for 28 years, is likely to walk if Roche's buyout goes through.

That could be very good for Bay Area biotech startups, and the venture capitalists who fund them. Unlike today's Web startups, which are frustratingly cheap to launch, biotech ventures require real money, which means VCs have something to offer. An exodus of talent from Genentech could turbocharge the sector.

And what of Levinson himself? He could well expand his role at Google. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tellingly, are married to women with biotech backgrounds, and have a fascination with the subject. They see the human genome as just another part of the world's information, which they've made it their mission to organize. Could Levinson become part of Larry and Sergey's intellectual petting zoo — like Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet? It sounds like a better gig than sitting in an office in South San Francisco taking orders from the Swiss.

Brin has a personal foundation, funded with some of his Google fortune. One of the largest recipients of his largesse is the Michael J. Fox Foundation, an organization founded by the Canadian actor and dedicated to researching Parkinson's disease, from which Fox suffers.

In May, 23andMe announced that it was signing up Parkinson's patients for its genetic-testing services. The tests would be paid for by a $600,000 grant from the Fox foundation.

Wojcicki described the approach in a Huffington Post op-ed as "Research 2.0." To our ears, this sounds more like a good old-fashioned back-scratching arrangement.

Here are the questions people ought to be asking: Was Brin's donation really a donation, since some of it ended up going into his wife's pockets? And should the Fox grant count as revenues for 23andMe, since the money can be traced back to Brin, the cofounder of Google, an important investor in the startup? If IRS and SEC officials don't start looking into the deals, then they're not doing their jobs.

How can Brin make this right, if he really believes in his company's code of conduct and the "don't be evil" culture he helped foster at Google? Google should immediately sell its shares in 23andMe, at cost. 23andMe should return the Fox grant. And the Michael J. Fox foundation should return Brin's donation.

Brin, whose net worth was recently estimated at $18.5 billion, can easily afford to invest personally in his wife's startup. And there's no conflict in doing so; he'd merely be seen as a supportive, if indulgent, spouse. The problem comes when he starts using other people's money to fund Wojcicki's ventures. Google shareholders shouldn't be funding her experiments; neither should the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Nor should U.S. taxpayers be footing the bill. Especially considering that 23andMe's tests may not even be legal, according to the state of California.

Google's success has persuaded Brin that he doesn't need to listen to other people's advice, or follow their petty little rules; his gut instincts have made him fabulously wealthy, so why should he? He may not have crossed any legal lines in this latest episode of self-dealing — but it shows that he's on a path to do so. Sergey, stop now, before you really embarrass yourself.

"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest-paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest-paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Schools, of course, cost money. Google doesn't actually run a school, so Brin must be talking about the workers at his company's wildly overpriced childcare centers. On the Google model, even with teachers at the bottom rung on the payroll ladder, Brin's answer was to demand more money from parents.

Yet I haven't exactly seen Brin standing in solidarity with the teacher unions in California when they've lobbied for salary increases and smaller class sizes. Nor has Brin come out against Prop 13, the bill which froze property taxes in California, permanently hobbling education spending. But then it's been typical of Google to think they can have their gourmet, organic, locally-sourced cake and eat it, too.(Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

Nocera reveals that, at Wojcicki's behest, Google decided to upgrade its childcare to a hyperluxurious standard, including adopting the Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy. The result: At tuition rates of roughly $14,000 to $19,000 a year, the subsidy paid by Google ballooned to $37,000 a year. From that followed a tuition hike to as much as $29,000 a year, at which price Google still loses money.

At no point, it seems, did Wojcicki or any of the others she involved in planning Google daycare do a market-rate analysis. They simply built the childcare facilities as they saw fit, and then priced it based on cost, not the going rates — even for the kind of quality care they professed to seek.

The Scandinavian School in San Francisco, for example, offers full-time Reggio Emilia daycare for $16,000 a year for infants, and less for toddlers and preschoolers. If the Scandinavian School charged Google's outsized rates, it would run a nearly 50 percent profit margin. Google, by contrast, is losing money by the fistful on its childcare.

So Google has on its hands a disaster: A disaster for parents, a disaster for children, and a disaster for Google shareholders. How does Google respond?

Not by fixing the problem, but instead by lying to a New York Times columnist. Nocera, a famed reporter, quotes Brin twice. Google PR repeatedly denied that Brin made these comments — an unbelievably brazen act, considering the remarks were made before large groups of Google employees. A sampler:

At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. “This is a supply-and-demand issue,” he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Of course, Google PR would deny that Brin made these statements. They are damning; they suggest the founder is out of touch with rank-and-file employees, and callous in his treatment of them. He surely is, but it is unseemly to admit as much.

Wojcicki, with Brin's permission — what an indulgent brother-in-law! — is conducting an experiment on her fellow Googlers, and their children. But Googlers did not sign up for this experiment. Any parent knows how difficult it is to find good, affordable childcare, and how wrenching for children it can be to change providers. The real test going on here isn't some kind of supply-and-demand economics experiment. It's how arrogant Brin and his clique can get before his employees revolt.

• The environment, burning enough fuel to power a car for a year in just one hour.
• Public safety: Even though private planes incur the same air-traffic control costs as commercial airliners, commercial planes pay for 95 percent of FAA air-traffic control costs in $2,015 in taxes per flight, while just accounting for 73 percent of air control capacity. Private planes only pay $236 per flight in taxes.
• Tax revenues: Private plane buyers can take a larger deduction their first year owning a new jet.
• The war on terror: The Department of Homeland Security IDs private planes as a particular risk.

Hi guys,

Are you or a graphic designer you know is looking for contract work? 23andMe is looking for contractors. (www.23andme.com)

The basic rundown:

We're looking for a super-talented individual or group that can design stuff that is clean, friendly, and smart. (no arbitrary swooshes!) If you're not working through me, then you'll be dealing with non-designers giving you project descriptions—so it helps if you're comfortable working with a fair amount of independence and can bring your own intellect to the table.

-Create stuff that can scale between print and web nicely.
-Ability to make sweet diagrams a plus (think Wired for level of science + accessible).
-Ability to make flash animations a plus
-Ability to edit video also great
-You will probably need to learn a little about our technology along the way. Poorly researched allusions to double-helices will not cut the proverbial mustard.
-Good communicator. We are busy and can be vague (I had this when I was a contractor) so you need to feel comfortable asking questions to get you the info you need.
-Work will target a wide audience from average Joes to researchers.
-Project by project basis, most likely the work will be in marketing materials and not tied to the actual website. So think items like booklets, logos, icons, posters.
-The items being created are small in scale but in content are very complex. you'll have to get a nuanced message across that is both sophisticated and accessible.
-Potential for full-time hire if interested.

Wojcicki has modest tastes in cars: She chauffeurs her kids in a Honda Odyssey minivan. But when it comes to spending Google's money, she is far less thrifty. Wojcicki, an early Google employee, was dissatisfied with Google's Kinderplex, which has been run by an outside firm, CCLC. CCLC is used by many companies in the Valley, including Cisco and Electronic Arts, but it wasn't good enough for Wojcicki, who pulled her children out, and set about designing a new Google-owned facility, with a blank check from Brin.

The Kinderplex is losing its lease this month. The Woods and the Wetlands, as Google's new child-care facilities are known, are implausibly plush — and proved hard to staff until Brin and cofounder Larry Page were dissuaded from rejecting caregivers who didn't have a 3.5 GPA from a top school.

The price is likewise out of sight. One of the new centers has 18,500 square feet for 80 children — or 230 sq. ft. per child. Minimum licensing requirements are 35 sq. ft. of usable floor space per child; a more generous recommendation is 50 sq. ft. per child. Even allowing for some space for other uses, that seems extravagant. Brin told employees that the new centers cost $40,000 a year per child to operate — more than the roughly $30,000 a year Google planned to charge employees, but also far above market rates.

That number was also a 75 percent increase over Kinderplex's near-market fees, and the figure sent Googlers, ever driven by data, into a frenzy of mathematical modeling. Detailed proposals for reducing the cost of the centers came out — and were ignored.

Google's chief child-care officer sent an email out a few weeks ago promising that prices wouldn't be raised 75 percent. Sure enough, they weren't. Instead, Google's head of HR, Laszlo Bock, told employees earlier this week that prices would be raised a mere ... 70 percent.

The monthly fee for a preschooler is rising from $1,070 to $1,710; for an infant, it's rising from $1,470 to $2,390. At those prices, one parent says, if you had two kids, you could afford to just hire a nanny instead.

For the likes of Wojcicki, a top Google executive and an IPO lottery winner, those costs are inconsequential; having a luxurious child-care center near the Google campus is more important. But for workaday Googlers, especially those who didn't join the company before the IPO, those prices are out of sight. Even Bock, Google's chief people officer who was saddled with the unfortunate task of explaining Wojcicki's decisions, has told fellow Googlers he will take his children elsewhere rather than pay the new rates.

We hear that one top Google lawyer has quit over the price hike — not because she couldn't afford it, but because the way Brin's inner circle decided it, without consulting the data. (This departure may come back to haunt the company.)

Google used to be a place where rank didn't matter: If the numbers showed you were right, Larry and Sergey could be persuaded. That Brin let his sister-in-law's wealthy whims rule over the interests of hundreds, if not thousands, of working Googlers shows that Google is becoming yet another big company, with an insular clique at its heart. What it proves is that at Google today, it's not what you know. It's who you know.

How lucky for Wojcicki's kids that her mother has friends in high places. How unfortunate that other parents don't. One can't fault Wojcicki for wanting good things for her children. But doing so with Google's money, creating a luxury service affordable only to top executives and IPO lottery winners? That's inexcusable.

I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space.

Actual Russian space program officials don't share the billionaire's enthusiasm. According to the New York Times, Vitaly Lopota, president of the company that makes Russia's spacecraft, said in April that he does favor space tourism and that Russia only allows it to make up for financial shortfalls. Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia's space agency, said all space tourism could end in 2010. Sorry, Sergey! (Photo by Gaetan Lee)

What ought to stop this search-engine sprawl: Googlers' own consciences, if they are still guided by the "Don't be evil" slogan. Developing new offices on the very fringe of Bay Area's suburbs, on areas that used to be wetlands, or neighbor the fragile ecosystems, is unconscionable. Despite the perk of free shuttle buses, most Googlers still drive carbon-emitting cars to work.

The Bay Area's infrastructure allowed Google to blossom. The region has asked far too little of it in return. Google should commit now to funding the extension of Santa Clara County's light-rail system through its new campus and its old one. It should also expand in cities like San Francisco, already served by public transit, rather than shuttle its workers 40 miles each way. Eliminating energy expended in transportation is far more productive than finding clever ways to achieve marginal efficiencies.

The environmental impact is one thing. But the business impact is another. Google's executives should also ask themselves: What kind of company do they want to be? Do they want to remain cloistered from the world, or engaged in it? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to place his company in downtown Palo Alto, with all the difficulties that poses; his choice meant that his workers rub shoulders daily with Stanford students, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists — and, shockingly, people not involved in the tech industry. On the Googleplex, Googlers live in a world of sameness, with people who never challenge their technology-über-alles worldview.

Larry and Sergey have built themselves a candy-colored bubble on the outskirts of Mountain View. By inflating it, as they've chosen to do, they only increase the risk that a competitor more in touch with the real world will pop it.

But Google only wants to give Yahoo so many options as long as there's even a remote possibility Microsoft will try to acquire the company. As soon as that threat's gone, expect word of "divided" Google executives worried about antitrust regulations to return — leaving Yahoo shareholders without a Google deal or a Microsoft deal. Just Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's infinite wisdom.

He told the gathered he agreed with the spirit of the proposals, just not their wording. Then, in the traditional way of voicing support for a cause without taking any real action, Brin abstained from voting them up or down. Lesser spin doctors would have stopped there, but Brin managed to get another couple good ones in before the meeting wrapped: "I'm pretty proud of what we've been able to accomplish in China," Brin said."Google has a far superior track record than other Internet or Internet search companies in China."

I remember I'd be babysitting and I'd be saving up money for the latest Guess? sweatshirt at the mall.

The launch of a designer-influenced iGoogle aside, is this a good time for Mayer to be bragging about her expensive wardrobe? Last we checked, Google's stock is in the tank, recession talk abounds, and ordinary people are choosing between new Wal-Mart George jeans and gasoline. Perhaps there's some countercyclical wisdom in Mayer's aspirational Web layouts: This is as close as most Google users will get to Mayer's lifestyle.

They'd read a lot of research around how to form the best companies and a lot of studies show that if you fall below 20 percent of the workforce being women, things become really imbalanced and unhealthy inside the corporate culture.

A pity. In the long run, a humbling would have helped Google. Instead, CEO Eric Schmidt's trademark cockiness was on display — to the point that he lied about the progress of its search for a replacement CFO. (Schmidt said in the earnings call that no offers had been made; we've heard two candidates have turned down the job so far.)

It's hard to imagine that an advertising downturn wouldn't hurt Google. Schmidt suggested that if economic conditions turned tough, Google would simply snap up more of the advertising market. And Google's failures? Someone else's fault. Sales chief Omid Kordestani blamed sluggish-headed advertisers for not embracing YouTube's video ads. Cofounder Sergey Brin suggested slow networks and lame phones were at fault for Google's still-nascent mobile-ads business.

Google, in short, remains in a bubble. Its fate is unaffected by the outside world, unless its executives need someone else — someone technologically inept, preferably — to take the fall. Just wait for Google to have a bad quarter. Expect to hear excuses so convoluted that it took an army of PhDs to come up with them.

1:30 p.m. Pacific: Waiting for the call to start. I note that Eric Schmidt's promise to rein in hiring hasn't had much effect. Aside from the DoubleClick acquisition, which added 1,500 employees, Google itself hired 851 employees. Google's employee count, continues to expand at roughly 5 percent a quarter. As of the end of March, before laying off roughly 150 DoubleClickers, Google had 19,156 employees. At that rate, Google will have 27,000 employees by the end of 2009.

1:35 p.m.: The usual crew: CEO Eric Schmidt, Larry and Sergey, outgoing CFO George Reyes, and top executives Jonathan Rosenberg and Omid Kordestani. Sergey must have hightailed it back from Tahiti, where he was recently spotted consorting with blog mogul Arianna Huffington and Wendi Deng, wife of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

1:37 p.m.: Schmidt says that Google is performing well "regardless of the business environment" and that its strategy is "transformative." See what I meant by "chest-thumping glee"? He addresses concern about Google's paid clicks, saying growth was "higher than third parties had speculated."

1:39 p.m.: Schmidt talks about its Web-based apps business, saying "all the pieces are coming together." He cites a partnership with Salesforce.com, but doesn't give any numbers. In other words, it's not a real business yet.

1:40 p.m.: Reyes, who resigned as CFO last August but still hasn't been replaced, recites the figures found in the press release. Is his sole remaining duty sparing Schmidt from having to utter a sentence with a number in it during this call? He's stumbling over simple phrases as he reads from a script.

1:44 p.m.: "Approximately 15 percent of the DoubleClick U.S. workforce" — another 200 or so — "are expected to leave in the near term," says Reyes, because they are in "transitional" roles.

1:46 p.m.: Sergey Brin takes the mic. He starts by talking about "almost 100 search improvements" made in the quarter. A lot of those, he says, are international — in other words, nothing that U.S. users will see. Google is increasingly showing non-website results, like books, images, and videos, in its search results. He claims mobile growth, but doesn't give any numbers.

1:52 p.m.: Larry Page starts talking about ads. He says Google has introduced demographic targeting for social networks, using gender and age information. The lack of this up until the recent quarter might explain why Google's social-network ads have performed so poorly. Until now, instead of fessing up to this basic technological shortcoming, Google has been blaming partners like MySpace for lower-than-expected revenues.

1:54 p.m.: Page says Google is "really excited" about YouTube ads. As he is about the acquisition of DoubleClick. As he is about the Salesforce.com partnership. Is there anything he's bored by? In a typical nerd mistake, he throws out terms like "wikis" and "cloud applications" without defining them for the Wall Street analysts who are listening, but not particularly caring.

1:57 p.m.: Schmidt wraps up quickly and goes to questions.

1:58 p.m.: Question on the search for a new chief financial officer. "We're very pleased George has remained," says Schmidt. "We have not made any offers yet." That, according to insiders familiar with the search, is simply a lie: Google has made two offers to prospective CFOs, both of whom have declined.

2:00 p.m.: Sales chief Omid Kordestani says that Toyota and Dunkin' Donuts, among others, have signed up as YouTube advertisers.

2:02 p.m.: Sergey Brin, who declared his hatred of Web banners years ago when Google launched its simple text ads, fields a question about putting banners on Google-owned sites. He notes that YouTube already carries banners, and other sites like Google Images and social network Orkut might also add them.

2:05 p.m.: Schmidt says the company hasn't seen any problems from the larger economy, batting away suggestions the U.S. is heading into an advertising recession. He says that in internal conversations, Google executives have concluded that it would do well even if a recession came, because its ads are so targeted.

2:10 p.m.: Brin fields a question about mobile ads. He says in markets where the devices and networks work well — "basically, Japan" — the ads perform well.

2:14 p.m.: Jonathan Rosenberg, who normally handles product management, is fielding a simple question about seasonality by offering a baroque explanation involving Easter's and a leap year. I suppose Google Calendar does fall under his purview.

2:17 p.m.: Talking about the failure of Google's ads to perform well on social networks, Larry Page turns to upspeak: "It's an area where we've applied a lot of new technologies?" He goes on to say that Google is "optimistic" and getting advertisers to embrace new tools "takes some time." In other words: Not our fault, and technology will fix everything once the Luddites die off.

2:20 p.m.: Kordestani admits that in retail, in the first quarter, Google has seen some "postponements" of budgets, but that other industries have made up for the shortfalls. As he flails, Jonathan Rosenberg, who's not actually in charge of advertising, jumps in. Schmidt finally cuts the answer short and goes to the next question.

2:28 p.m.: Kordestani fumbles another question about "integrated advertising" — campaigns which use search adds, display, and YouTube — with a rambling nonanswer.

2:34 p.m.: An analyst asks if U.S. revenues were flat quarter-over-quarter, not counting DoubleClick's contribution. Schmidt: "We know that it's not macroeconomic. It can have as much to do with the timing of deals." The classic excuse of enterprise-software companies, which Schmidt learneda t Sun and Novell: Blame laggard customers. And with that, Schmidt wraps up the call.

Who will also attend? Noted peace-lovers Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister last seen leading his country into Iraq under false pretenses, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, last seen making lewd comments to younger women — but before that, secretly bombing Cambodia. Forward-thinkers, all.

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(Kevin Rose photo by Sara Morishige)

[But] Larry and Sergey are now adult leaders of a god knows how many billion-dollar valuation company and have done it for a long time.

a second goal of 23andMe [is] to collect a large database of genetic information and then come back to you over time with invitations to provide specific health data and participate in research.

When you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving.

(Photo by jyri)

Priuses may be better for Google's corporate image, but not the images it hopes to snap for Street View. It's proved unfeasible to mount the bulky Street View cameras on a Prius. No word on whether Brin has been persuaded to compromise, or if his engineers have somehow found a solution. For now, it seems Google's hiring hundreds of drivers with nothing for them to drive.

(Photo by sebr)

• Bill Gates is out $6 billion since the beginning of the year and $3 billion since Microsoft bid on Yahoo
• Steve Ballmer's net worth is down $3 billion since 2007
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs has lost $400 million in six weeks.
• Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are both down $5 billion so far this year.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt lost $2 billion this year.

But while we're at it, Wojcicki's a bit cheap, too: She's married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who lent her startup money until Google itself came in as an investor. you'd think she could afford to spare a few more Spit Kit giveaways.