scicomms is very important. if we are making progress on matters related to human health, we should do our best to explain the developments to the general public. however, it must be remembered that the entirety of human history has been marked by false & exploitative claims /1
with respect to longevity. plants & their extracts have always been claimed to have essentially magical properties of age reversal. extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. journals have repeatedly failed us & have legitimized overblown claims, exciting- /2
sounding mechanisms & nonreproducible results that were heavily biased by models, expectations & the subsequent exploitation of the resulting stories. the longevity field has assuredly been fouled by this stuff. publication & defense of bad science undermines real progress. /3
when I speak out on the cultism that underlies much of the work on resveratrol, pterostilbene & sirtuins, I am surely startling members of the general public who thought that the aging problem was solved. I am also alerting working scientists that the terminology /4
& expectations of this field wrt to anti-aging were built on a house of cards that collapsed long ago. yeast work on SIR2 could have just as easily created expectations that the gene family was in favor of short lifespan when Longo showed that sir2 mutants live chronologically /5
longer. the yeast replicative lifespan results that the Guarente group established are fine except that extra copies of SIR2 genes don't extend lifespan in any other organism. despite failure to replicate, the worm & fly papers are not being retracted. the resveratrol story /6
was one of the greatest stories ever told but resveratrol has a physical interaction with the fluorescent reporter group, which is why it fooled ppl who claimed it as a sirtuin activator. David is simultaneously defending two different stories on how it works. /7
the book says he found it to extend lifespan in yeast but he now says that it binds to a sequence that is only found in human SIRT1. troubling. try not to blame the messenger alerting the general public & the scientific community of these problems. /8
it helps no one & hurts many for false claims to go unchallenged. always ask yourself, how do we know the things we think we know /end
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