André Prager turns away from me for a moment, rummaging through a pile of stuff on the cart he has pulled into the small conference room. There are lots of cut-up pieces of cardboard, with a few bags of colorful plastic odds and ends mixed in. "I think the most valuable things in this building are cardboard and tape," he says. He shows me a rectangle of foam-core with a straw, a broken pen, and a few thumb tacks stuck to it. It looks like junk, but because we're at 100 Mayfield Avenue in Mountain View, California, the headquarters of X, Alphabet's secretive division dedicated to cranking out new Googles, it's actually anything but.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gleaming like a modernist and high-tech Apple Store, health care start-up Forward has designed a doctor's office/pharmacy of the future. Tuesday, Forward opened the doors of what it hopes is the first of many state-of-the-art medical facilities in the USA. The 3,500-square-foot office, based downtown, combines six examination rooms equipped with interactive displays and two body scanners that collect data via wearable sensors. "Health care is not a repair shop but an ongoing relationship," says Forward CEO Adrian Aoun, a former Alphabet executive who co-founded Forward with Ilya Abyzov, an Uber executive who helped launched uberX; Erik Frey, who led artificial intelligence initiatives at Google; and Rob Sebastian, who led product strategy for several GoogleX moonshot projects. "We want proactive preventive health care that is data-driven, but do it at lower prices," says Aoun, who was motivated to tackle health after a younger relative of his suffered a heart attack in 2015 -- then was hit with a $100,000 medical bill.