🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Harris wrote:

> I've been arguing for a short refeed control
> for CR experiments for years, but nobody really wanted to do it
> ...
> I am told by one worker that they are gearing up to at last try a
> refeed control

That's excellent news -- I entirely support your reasoning for it.
However, I think what you wrote at the top:

> the gene
> expression changes brought about by CR are far larger than the changes
> induced by normal aging, indeed "old age," itself!  That makes CR, as
> heretofore done, more or less worthless as a tool for studying what
> genes are important to aging-- the noise is several times worse than
> the phenomena.  

is misinterpretable, because it reads as though the only interesting
effects of CR are the retardations of the changes that normally happen
in aging, whereas I think everyone agrees that these retardations are a
result of big changes which don't normally occur in aging at all, and
moreover that those big, causative changes are the ones one would seek
to mimic pharmacologically for life-extension purposes.  I see what you
mean, but I think that such changes are still reasonably describable as
important to aging, even if they're not important to ad-lib aging.  In
other words, the "noise" you refer to is a perfectly meaningful part of
the signal -- just that it's a different signal.

Aubrey de Grey