There are lots of problems with research. I think research actually needs to work towards post publication peer review with the reviewers getting paid for their work.
However, even then there remain things like selection bias.
Much that people criticise N=1 biohacking research if enough is done to a sufficiently high standard it is possible to learn things. (it needs more than one person doing it).
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Don’t bet your life on something you read in a scientific study (or even worse, in an article or on a forum). Kaeberlein says to never believe a scientific study until it has been replicated in an entirely different lab.
I can’t get over how unaggressive in terms of life extension interventions the most reputable scientists are in the longevity field. This fact has influenced me more than anything else.
I attribute this to their long exposure to boom bust cycles for “breakthroughs”.
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vongehr
#4
Yep, and if you are like me focussing on the interesting controversial stuff, thus discovering lots of fraud in every sub field visited, then soon your career is over, no money, though actually citations, but the criticised and debunked go on getting positions.
You guys on forums like this ought to be even far more careful, especially with the “firmly now by all the relevant names established” stuff. I know how that works!
And it is the supposedly best journals that usually have the worst most brazen frauds, like the memristor debakle in Science and Nature.
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Curious
#5
David Sinclair still promote resveratrol in an anti-aging protocol. In spite lots of research showing no benefits. His incentive to misslead the public is the huge pile of money he received. Sinclair created a company in 2004 to develop resveratrol-based anti-aging drugs — a company he sold to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for a reported $720 million.
So he keep misleading customers around the world.
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Beth
#6
This is a very important post and I’m saddened to learn about it.
Am I in any way shocked? Nope, not in the least. The idea of big institutions/companies defending their scientists (or ceo/talent/star) on an accusation of fraud is completely believable once you replace the term fraud with sexual misconduct.
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JuanDaw
#7
Discussed earlier.
A blow by blow of how the fraud was discovered is detailed in an article at science.org, linked in that thread, and below.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
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JuanDaw
#8
Schrag’s source of interest, and empathy.
After leaving the Air Force, Schrag’s dad became a nurse and worked in a nursing home. As a young teen, Schrag volunteered to visit dementia patients there. “I remembered being mystified by a lot of the strange behaviors,” he says. It was a formative experience to see people struggling with such unfair symptoms.
Cholesterol was Schrag’s early suspect.
In 2006, Schrag’s first publication examined how feeding a high-cholesterol diet to rabbits seemed to increase Aβ plaques and iron deposits in one part of their brains. Not long afterward, when he was an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Loma Linda University, another research group found support for a link between Alzheimer’s and iron metabolism.
But what was true for rabbits was not replicable in humans.
Encouraged, Schrag poured his energy into trying to confirm the connection in people—and failed.
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jakexb
#9
Absolutely. David Sabatini doesn’t even take rapamycin himself. James Kirkland doesn’t take senolytics himself. Kind of mind blowing to consider.
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A lot of people don’t understand balancing the risk of acting against the risk of not acting. The medical profession, probably for good reasons, is strongly driven to ignore the risk of not acting when it comes to age based diseases.
It is a complex question because people have tried all sorts of things that really were not strongly evidence based.
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There is a difference between understanding and being willing to do what is necessary to be careful. How much effort do you put into your interventions? Weekly blood tests? Multiple labs to avoid unreliable test results. How many hours of research do you do to make decisions about what to try and how to evaluate the effects?
Almost no one will invest this much effort even to save their lives.
More credit to you.
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Beth
#12
Agree with you. One of my goals in life is to spend a day with @John_Hemming
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Its overrated (interestingly an extended ellipsis does not count for 20 chars)
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Beth
#14
Indeed. It would be overrated if I forgot to bring the interpreter to help me understand what you were saying. 
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Just to clarify this a bit, I don’t think Sinclair was working at the company at the point it was sold and I think he was about a 10% shareholder (as the key founder) at that point, so I suspect he grossed a few percentage points (after taxes) from that deal.
I’m not disagreeing with the key points of our post, just clarifying.
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It seems to me that the entire incentive structures in academic research are misaligned with public benefit… people are rewarded for positive studies, so there is going to be a huge incentive to do small incremental benefit studies based on previous positive research. I’m not sure what the solution is, but there are issues here that need to be addressed.
There will always be incentives / pressures to push things a little further, just as there is in business; there are similar incentives in most business environments; and occasionally you’ll get the Enrons, Theranos’, the FTXs of the world.
The legal system in the USA doesn’t seem to be very good at policing white collar and political crimes so much, so perhaps the justice system also needs to be reformed. I suspect that in business, just as in Academia, there is a ton of white collar crime; from insider trading, to just “bending” the rules, and most goes undetected and unpunished. Why would academia be any different?
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Curious
#19
That is new to me. I have read many articles claiming that he made a fortune. If it is only 70 millions? Then there is lots of desinformation out there. A Fact check is needed.
Actually - its easy to fact check this, so I looked up the prospectus for Sirtris online. David Sinclair only owned 1.11% of the company at the time of IPO (less after the IPO dilution) - and the GSK acquisition took place sometime after the IPO, so after taxes he made a few million (after capital gains taxes), it seems. It probably bought him a reasonably nice house in the Boston area but definitely not “the richest scientist in America” as Brad Stanfield seems to identify him as…
The prospectus is here if you want to read more:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1388775/000104746907004542/a2178109z424b4.htm#ea1068_principal_stockholders
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Curious
#22
That is kind of terrible. He is mentioned as someone that made a huge amount of money on resveratrol…
It doesn’t really matter precisely how much he made from this. What matters is how good his scientific work is. This situation was not good. That does not mean what he is doing now is bad. I am however not that supportive of his work.
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