[xaa]

That sounds interesting. This is a really busy period but within the next few weeks I hope to check it out.

In general, I love meeting with the non-academic side of this work. I met de Grey and some of his associates at last year's AAA meeting. The relationship is complicated, as you know.

I see the value in both types of research -- people working outside the system don't have to worry about IRBs, paper-writing, etc, and can take risks we can't. OTOH, there are a lot of very smart people on the inside who are working on "things that matter". For example, Jim Kirkland and senolytics. They have access to expertise, funding, samples, and personnel that the non-academic community cannot realistically match. Although the entrance of Calico et al is a new quantity and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.

As a very short summary of my focus, I came into the field, read a lot of papers, and came to the conclusion "no one knows what causes aging". So my focus is on bioinformatics systems to process a lot of data and help me figure out what direction should be most fruitful to focus on. I work with wet-lab people but don't do it myself.

I hope the new generation of academic aging researchers will reach out more to the non-academic side more, though. I plan to do so.

[kanzure]

After a conference once, Aubrey sat down with me at whatever bar we were at, and he told me that one of the dirty little secrets about the field of aging research is that nobody really reads that many papers.

I laughed it off, I thought he was pulling a fast one on me. At the time I was intentionally reading about 10 papers/day ( http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/ not all of them on longevity, of course). I told him my personal target, and he basically said nope, other people are reading at most a few papers per month.

I don't really think the academic system is working :-). Biology is crazy complex, there's just no way for anyone to get enough context if they are just grazing around.

[xaa]

> nobody really reads that many papers

That is very true. Nowadays, a good day for me is 3. We're too busy writing papers, writing grants, writing code, answering e-mails, filling out forms, or whatever. But I work at an institute that does a lot besides aging. I don't get the impression this is specific to the aging field.

But on the other hand, the truth is that most papers do not have very much relevant information in them. There are millions of papers published per year. Aging is so interdisciplinary it would be foolish to think that if you just read J. Gerontology (now "GeroScience" lol, that was done to suck up to Felippe Sierra), Aging Cell, and a few others, you'll be caught up.

That's why I went to the data. Even IF a human could read them all, most of the interesting data nowadays is high-throughput and is analyzed in the most shallow way within the text. The real beef is deposited in GEO or SRA.

I am inclined to think that biology works in a way that is not very comprehensible to the human mind. For example, when humans design a system, it's modular, and you try to minimize the number of interdependencies between modules.

In biology, it seems almost everything affects everything else, to the point that if someone publishes a paper saying "X upregulates Y", I find it almost irrelevant; they have, assuming everything was done correctly, characterized one edge in a very highly connected network. Probably the "X upregulates Y" is contextual as well.

I don't know the solution to all this. I just wanted to do this as a career, and as a graduate student we very clearly learned that there are certain lines we need to color within if we wanted to be paid to do research.