Google has launched a novel study of the human body aimed at making you healthy by determining what it is that makes you healthy.

"It may sound counter-intuitive, but by studying health, we might someday be better able to understand disease," said Andrew Conrad, molecular biologist who is leading the study at Google X, the "secret" Google laboratory conducting the study.

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"This research could give us clues about how the human body stays healthy or becomes sick, which could in turn unlock insights into how diseases could be better detected or treated."

Google calls its study, which it claims "has never been done before," the "Baseline Study." The study is being led by the Google X secret laboratory and is now in its pilot phase.

What Google is doing is exploring the human body to develop a definition for a "healthy" person by cells and molecules. A healthy person will basically be a person with healthy cells and molecules.

Google hopes to create what it hopes will be the fullest picture of what a healthy human being should be. 

The study will enroll 175 anonymous healthy individuals who will go through medical examinations similar to what they would receive from a primary care doctor. The participants' body fluids like urine, blood and saliva will also be tested.

Google said it will use its massive computing power to uncover patterns, or "biomarkers" buried in the molecular information of these participants.

The result will be to push medicine more toward prevention rather than treatment.

Google said Baseline is intended as a contribution to science and is "not intended to generate a new product at Google."

It will make the Baseline study and research data available to qualified healthcare researchers.

Google will later recruit thousands more participants for the study. A team of some 70 to100 experts from fields including molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology and imaging are involved in the Baseline Study.

Dr. Conrad described the Baseline Study a giant leap into the unknown since the human body is so complex and little is known about the interactions between DNA, enzymes and proteins and environmental factors.

He expects advances to be made in "little increments."

Some doctors, however, feel the Baseline Study is potentially more intrusive that similar past studies since Google will collect participants' genetic and molecular information.

There are also privacy concerns about how Google will use the data and what it will do with the entire genomes of the study participants and their parents' genetic history.