[HN Gopher] Scientists scramble to keep dog aging project alive
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Scientists scramble to keep dog aging project alive
Author : benbreen
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-01-12 03:45 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| davidkong0987 wrote:
| Reminds me of full metal alchemist
| AdoHaha wrote:
| How?
| jareklupinski wrote:
| The pig goes: "Oink"
|
| The cow goes: "Moo"
|
| The dog goes: "Ed...ward...?"
|
| Full Metal Alchemist
| Quixotica1 wrote:
| Classic
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Too soon. Its always too soon.
| mech422 wrote:
| Dam man.. that one always gets me...
| graeme wrote:
| Anyone know why the agency might drop funding midway through? It
| doesn't sound like there was a cost overrun.
|
| Sunk cost fallacy doesn't justify spending, but the project is
| now much cheaper than it would be to start afresh.
| prepend wrote:
| Seems like they ran into some management issues and the
| research didn't yield the results (as far as publications) that
| they expected in their application. And it's a big grant at
| $28M. So that's a lot to spend on researchers who seemed
| surprised at the difficulty of running such a study and didn't
| seem to generate many new findings over the course of 5 years.
|
| For example...
|
| > The researchers estimated in their 2018 grant application
| that it would take at least three months to build the physical,
| digital and human infrastructure for the study. The process
| ended up taking three years.
|
| This is all good for a private philanthropist. But the NIH is
| taxpayer funded and $28M given to this grant means other grants
| not funded.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Have you seen how large their "Executive Leadership" team is?
|
| I'm more than a bit skeptical that enough funding is being
| funneled into the research itself.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "we meant dog-years!"
| woleium wrote:
| but... dog years are _shorter_ than human years?
| prepend wrote:
| > A petition asking for continued support from the National
| Institutes of Health has garnered more than 10,000 signatures
|
| I don't think NIH should be awarding grants based on petitions
| from the public.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Why not? We pay for it. I don't see why public interest
| shouldn't at least be considered as a factor. (If there is any,
| that is -- most NIH studies don't get on the the media's radar
| for the public to even find out about them.)
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Petitions are a pretty poor measure for generic public
| interest, much poorer even than polling or voting.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| So? Are you suggesting polling or putting the NIH funding
| agenda to a public vote? If not, the fact that there even
| _is_ a petition, is a pretty good indication of public
| interest.
|
| Petitions work like internet comments: lurkers (non-
| signers) far outnumber commenters and posters (signers).
| One person's signature is an indication that there more
| people out there who are interested as well.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| This sounds logical until you realize that there are
| petitions with very large numbers of signatures (relative
| to petitions more broadly), that we _also_ have polling
| for and that are, from polling, relatively unpopular. If
| the people who care care a lot, then you can get a
| sizeable petition (again, relative to petitions
| generally) even if there aren 't a ton of "lurkers" who
| also support it but aren't signing.
|
| And this pattern of "small but very passionate minority
| vs large and slightly anti- majority" is a relatively
| common one (or flip the valences).
|
| There is _probably_ a correlation between number of
| signatures and broader appeal, but I would bet that it 's
| a _very_ weak one.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 10,000 self-selected people out of 300,000,000 isn't a
| good sign of public interest, let alone preference. That
| is 0.003% of the public. That means 99.997% of the public
| could oppose it. Maybe for every lurker who supports it,
| there are thousands of lurkers who oppose it. We just
| don't know. That's why it's not a good indicator.
|
| Proper polling, on the other hand, _can_ be a pretty good
| indication of public interest. Not that it 's necessarily
| a good option for a government agency to poll for every
| decision.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Petition away, but isn't it also fair to demand transparency?
|
| I'd like to balance it out with some investigation or report
| of this project.
|
| Their website is incredibly light on financial details.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It seems like a logical idea, but then projects that do
| manage go get on the media's radar start to get more funding
| leading teams to spend a significant portion of their budget
| on PR and target more popular areas.
| kashunstva wrote:
| I'd hazard a guess that a only a small minority of potential
| signers of public petitions to the NIH could, for example,
| describe how mRNA vaccines work, or the genetic processes
| underlying the differentiation of species, etc etc. but
| should we entrust them to effectively sort out biomedical
| research priorities? Yes, it would be interesting to see how
| public opinions line up with expert priorities, if only to
| uncover and address gaps in public understanding of science.
| PakG1 wrote:
| You assume that the public has objective commitment to the
| scientific method. An example where this could be an issue is
| climate change. There is a significant portion of the public
| that is interested in showing that climate change is not
| really happening. I had a conversation just last week with
| someone who says that society should have more of a debate
| about climate change because he thinks that politicians are
| just making noise about it for personal political agendas and
| that reality is really still uncertain. He made it clear to
| me that his opinion was that climate change is absolutely not
| happening. We didn't get to the part where the debate for
| scientists is for the most part settled and reality is
| certain, and that conclusion just hasn't transferred over to
| public opinion for whatever reason.
|
| If we get public interest to be a factor, we risk biased
| thinking to sway what gets funded based on biased opinion,
| rather than scientific interest and scientific method.
| piuantiderp wrote:
| Because democracy has its limits, this is common knowledge
| among educated people for the past 2000 or so years
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Is there a financials breakdown for this project?
|
| The project started in 2014 and they have--and continue to--
| solicit donations from the general public.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| https://archive.ph/NSJOV
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Maybe that dog lifespan prolonging startup should pitch in. Kinda
| like how tech startups don't pitch in to fund the open source
| projects they rely on
| idopmstuff wrote:
| This isn't like that at all - that startup (Loyal) is running
| their own clinical trial, not relying on the aging project.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| I wonder if that is part of the story here - seems like that
| company has come along and shown it's possible to bring a
| solution to market faster.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| As a former neuroscience researcher, I sure wish I could have
| gotten the NY Times to write a feature article when my grants
| didn't get funded.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| oh the trick is to pay a publicist, and keep shopping around
| for publicists that have the right network
|
| there is nothing organic or merit based happenstance about this
| stuff, money talks even if its in a roundabout way, but its not
| as much money as you might think
|
| $800 - $6,000 a month
|
| my friend put me on to it and our google results look pretty
| impeccable, but behind the scenes there are lots of other
| things that aren't even for SEO, just the right people to
| notice
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I can confirm this.
| xhevahir wrote:
| FWIW, the NYT's decision to cover this particular story could
| be as simple as an editor's having figured out that pet-
| related content sells really, really well.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| which your publicist will find out and make sure that _you_
| , as a representative of _your_ pet project, are selected
| for the quotes in the article
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Given how much undeployed philanthropic money there is out
| there, it doesn't seem like it would be a bad thing to have at
| risk research projects be highlighted more regularly in the
| news.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| In my country a plurality of our citizens voluntarily and
| enthusiastically contribute to a state-sponsored humanitarian
| charity in which they all flush a billion post-tax
| philanthropic dollars down the toilet about once every 3-5
| weeks, by handing it over to a random nobody who promptly
| disappears from the face of the Earth along with the rest of
| their family, and the process starts all over again.
|
| The name of this bizarre giving tradition is called The
| National lottery, and we actually have several going at once
| in case anyone feels they aren't being generous enough.
|
| We _can_ have nice things, but most of us want this instead.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| People playing the lottery aren't donating money, they are
| buying the mental image of winning it - just listen to them
| daydreaming about what they will buy and how they split the
| money. They might also, with a minuscule chance, have an
| immediate positive effect on their life via an enormous
| influx of money to their bank account [0]. This is not at
| all comparable to donating to science, where the positive
| effects for oneself are years away, if they materialize at
| all. It's a completely different mindset.
|
| If you can't comprehend this, think about how older people
| talk about you wasting money on video games with virtual
| items that are, theoretically, instantly replicated at no
| cost. Looks stupid on paper, too, but how it makes you feel
| is why you spend the money.
|
| [0] I know that winning the lottery has been bad luck for a
| lot of people, but people playing the lottery either don't
| think that far or have "solid" plans for avoiding this
| fate.
| green-salt wrote:
| After losing pets I am all about increasing their lifespans, but
| not at the cost of their comfort and health.
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