Master of the online universe

Sergey Brin. Photo / AP

Sergey Brin started to change the world for the first time in 1995, when he was 21 years old. The Stamford University researcher was working on his doctorate when he got together with fellow student Larry Page and Google was born.

The internet search engine is now so powerful that it is a household name on every continent and, arguably, the most powerful media organisation in the world. Now, 14 years later, Brin looks set to change the world again.

This month, the 35-year-old, who now lives in a big house on the southern peninsula of San Francisco, announced he is investing unspecified millions of the profits in a research programme into Parkinson's disease. This has been welcomed by the scientific community as having the potential to revolutionise medical research. It is not just money that Brin is bringing to the Parkinson's research project - it's a way of thinking about the world which has been pioneered by Google.

Rather than being controlled by doctors in laboratories, and therefore limited by numbers and reliant on the time and input of a few researchers, it is being conducted through the internet. Current plans are to analyse the DNA of 10,000 Parkinson's sufferers, who will then fill out web-based questionnaires about their lives and symptoms, becoming an internet community of their own.

The aim is to discover which lifestyle and genetic factors contribute to the disease. Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, a Massachusetts-based research centre, describes the approach as "a Googley thing to do". Catherine Paddock, a doctor writing for the American website Medical News Today, considers the approach may bring about "a social revolution in how research is done and who owns it".

The plan is inspiring fierce debate. Scepticism has been provoked by the fact that the company carrying out the Parkinson's research, 23andMe (named after the 23 chromosome pairs every human has), is co-owned and co-managed by Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki. Although Brin is largely financing the research, there is the potential for the company to make a profit by selling the results to drugs companies. Writing on her blog, Wojcicki explains their aim: "Our approach is new because it leverages the web to bring people together from all over the globe who are willing to share information about their own health experiences [phenotype], which is then combined with their genetic profile [genotype]."

Rival genetic research firms claim the approach can result in poor-quality data because it is reliant on amateurs reporting on themselves. But 23andMe is not Brin's only family connection to the enterprise. Last year, the Google founder discovered that the makeup of his DNA - he has a genetic mutation - means he has a 50/50 chance of developing Parkinson's. His mother, who developed the disease, also had the mutation, and Brin has already announced his plans to have his 4-month-old son tested to see whether he has inherited the trait.

Brin is facing the discovery with the confidence of a self-made billionaire, but tempered by the down-to-earth attitude reported by colleagues throughout his career. "I give it a 50/50 shot of medicine catching up to be able to deal with it," he says.

Is Brin effectively going to defeat Parkinson's with hard cash? Turning medical research on its head is just one of his current projects. At the same time as being involved, as part of a triumvirate with co-founders Larry Page and chief executive Eric Schmidt - with the day-to-day running of Google, his expansion plans stretch from literature - Google has hopes of digitising every book ever published - into outer space.

Brin is one of the founder members of the Orbital Mission Explorers Circle, set up by the space tourism company Space Adventures, which has cost him US$5 million ($9.3 million) in deposit, while Google has sponsored a competition to land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon.

"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," Brin has said. This is no doubt something he has inherited from his mother Eugenia, a scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre near Washington DC, and his father Michael, who became a professor of mathematics only because plans to study astronomy were thwarted by the university admissions policies in the USSR of the early 1970s, which discriminated against Jewish people.

Brin is also passionate about the environment. "Energy is going to be a big deal for him," says a senior manager who recently left Google. "He looks at how traditional business is done and it frustrates the hell out of him." This has led not just to his decision to upgrade his Toyota Prius to the more eco-friendly Tesla Roadster, an electric vehicle with a range of 354km, but also to his making an investment of at least US$10 million in the company that is being hailed as the future of the motor industry.

Born in Moscow in August 1973, Brin's first five years were spent in a 32.5sq m apartment shared with his grandmother, although his parents recall that he spent at least four hours a day outside, no matter what the weather.

In 1977, Michael Brin travelled to Warsaw for a mathematics conference, which brought together academics from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and came back convinced of the opportunities for his family in the West. The following year, he applied for exit visas from the Soviet Union for the family and after several tense months, during which he was fired from his job and Eugenia asked to leave hers, they were granted permission to leave. Their route to New York took the family first to Vienna and then to Paris, but by the end of 1979 they had settled in Maryland, bought a Ford and Sergey had started at the local Montessori school where he learnt English (though he still retains a hint of a Russian accent).

"I really enjoyed the Montessori method," he says. "I could grow at my own pace." From there, he moved to the local high school and then to the University of Maryland. Brin was considered to be a bright boy by his teachers, but contemporaries do not remember him as particularly outstanding.

On graduating, however, he won a place to study for a PhD in mathematics at Stanford, a private research university in California with a fearsome reputation, and in 1995 he was assigned to show around a new student named Larry Page, the son of computer scientists and also of Jewish background. A Google executive, who has asked not to be named because he regards Brin as "a very private person", says that over the next days, Brin and Page argued, talked and debated and they haven't stopped since. The pair became intellectual soulmates and close friends.

The idea for Google, which grew from these discussions, was based on the concept in academia that the number of times a research paper was cited by other academics provided a good guide to its importance. By applying this reasoning to web pages, so that those most often linked to other websites should come highest in the search rankings, they came up with the plan for Google. What followed is well known to fans of technology and entrepreneurship, from the US$100,000 cheque written by the Sun Systems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, payable to Google Inc, a company which did not yet exist; to the garage they rented as their first office, from Susan Wojcicki (now Brin's sister-in-law), at Menlo Park, California; to the mass of awards that followed; to the partnership with internet service provider America Online; to the flotation on Wall Street in August 2004.

Today, Brin sits in 26th place on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, with a fortune of US$12 billion. Eric Schmidt, who was brought in as CEO in 2001, says 98 per cent of their revenue comes from advertising. The search engine, email service and other innovations, such as Google Maps, are, in commercial terms, just methods of attracting people to the site.

Brin is, of course, no more a simple advertising man than he is a simple technical pioneer. Through his external investments and by the ever-adaptable nature of Google, Brin turns private passions into projects with real momentum. But medical research, the private jet and space exploration aside, does he enjoy his money? "From my parents I certainly learned to be frugal and to be happy without very many things,"

Brin told the Jewish Chronicle in April 2007. "It's interesting - I still find myself not wanting to leave anything [food] on the plate uneaten. I still look at prices. I try to force myself to do this less, not to be so frugal. But I was raised being happy with not so much." He shops at a wholesale shop, and enjoys cooking. A friend says that, unlike other Silicon Valley tycoons, the decidedly un-nerdy Brin still spends a lot of his downtime outside, as he did as a 5-year-old in Moscow.

Only these days it's "kitesurfing, windsurfing, diving, rollerblading, bike riding and skiing - he's a very keen skier".

Brin's attitude to these athletic pursuits is described as "competitive, in a friendly way". It's tempting to say that the Earth is Brin's playground, but he has already told us that he intends to fly far higher than that.

Sergey Brin

Born: August 21, 1973 in Moscow, eldest son of Michael, a mathematician, and Eugenia, a scientist. Emigrated to America in 1979.
Best of times: On Google's first day of stock market trading in 2004, six years after Brin and partner Larry Page had started the company in a rented garage, shares went from US$85 to US$100.
Worst of times: His early years in Soviet Moscow living under a cloud of unspoken anti-semitism while at times both his parents were out of work.
He says: "Don't be evil." - Google's operating philosophy. "I was told your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a math competition throughout all Israel. What I have to say is in the words of my father: 'What about the other three?"' - On a visit to a school in Tel Aviv
They say: "Every time I think of it, I'm amazed at every level. They're absolutely in the business of revolutionising the nature of knowledge; search has become integral in the way we think and act." - Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today's internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy. "What we share is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up." - Barack Obama, visiting the Google offices in November 2007.

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