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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

It's a fundamental problem with modern day medical research. Rational people would start from the principle that "every x is correlated somehow to every y" (in this case "every aspect of the human body and environment is related to aging"). Now that aspect is taken care of, so rational people can proceed to figuring out quantitative models of these relationships.

However, the current paradigm is to reward people who check for "significant differences/correlations", which just means that they "discover" all these non-zero correlations. Basically it is a huge waste of time and money but it works really well to generate an endless series of breathless press releases.

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Go ahead and knock yourself out. If you think “creating a quantitative model” of senescence is easy for “rational people”, then go right ahead. Your Nobel prize awaits.

Well, I didn't study senescence but actually did do something similar.

It required training myself in math, programming, history of the topic, and stats in addition to the normal grad school stuff (memorizing stuff for classes, data collection, etc) which amounted to about 3 years of working almost nonstop.

Turns out nobody cared, all they wanted to know is if there was a significant difference between groups. My attempt caused me health, financial, and social problems for literally an anti-reward so I would not recommend anyone try it. I also don't believe anyone would get a nobel prize for that in the current environment, they would be ignored or fought against because some holy cows would need to be sacrificed.

EDIT: As a more concrete example. Look at the pushback against Tomasetti & Vogelstein for daring to point out that there is a base rate of mutations per cell division and accumulated mutations lead to cancer, so cancers arise more often in tissues with more divisions. This is almost common sense, but people cannot handle it for some reason: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/no-cance...

Yes there are some idiots that dismissed the tomasetti and vogelsteinn paper due to it conflicting with their worldview, but they only got momentum because the original paper really was crap from even a critical scientific POV. What’s very ironic is that the problems with the paper seem to be the same things you’re bitching about in your post. No one smart is criticizing the paper for the “common sense” part, but because they actually tried to quantify it and their method was quite flawed.

What were the problems in that paper? The good stuff is that they were able to come up with estimates for stem cell divisions and were able to see a correlation with the cancer risk.

The bad stuff was the usual misinterpreting correlation coefficients and p-values (this is standard, found in pretty much every paper) and that the data is messy/incomplete. I mean, sure more people should be working on figuring out the number of stem cell divisions by tissue and other nations should collect data of the same quality as SEER...

If it was just another standard "smoking/sunlight/etc causes cancer" paper with the same issues there would not have been this response. It even says so in the atlantic, people think this information undermines their public health campaigns:

>'The paper triggered a hailstorm of criticism. Some scientists chastised the methods. Why did they ignore common cancers like breast and prostate? Why did they only focus on the U.S.? Others accused the duo of undermining public health. Many personal choices, from quitting smoking to staying lean, can dramatically reduce one’s risk of cancers, but why would you bother if you read headlines saying that these diseases are “largely down to bad luck?”' https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/no-cance...

I would suggest you do not use your personal failures and frustrations as justification to call other researchers work a waste of time. Please go ahead and explain to us how their contribution to science is a waste of time and money (you could for example contrast it with your own accomplishments).

There is nothing complicated about this problem: Discovering that an aspect of human cells/tissue plays a role in any aspect of human health is a waste of time because we already know this is true to begin with. Nothing has been learned.

Now I am sure there is some other info in these papers that may be useful about how the nucleolus changes with age, etc but, like the OP noted, the headlines are all about "playing a role".

Excellent answer to a sarcastic troll. The best and brightest are obviously not going into science, and those who do must learn to play the idiotic game for survival.

Nonbel, please do you have some pointer to your research?

Sorry but I specifically don't give examples using my former research in this light because these problems are very general. I don't want to seem like I place any blame on a specific organization, program, or person (nor contribute to anyone else doing so).

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