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Comment by robwwilliams | Hacker News Reader

A single fully inbred strain of mouse was used in this study—C57BL/6J. And only females. This is as if the FDA tested a drug in one human and then said—“Good to go.” Ridiculous.

Please before you recommend these studies to HN look at the methods section and evaluate the animal model. Any study using only one type of mouse or rat is just a pretty Potemkin village. Results are neither robust within the species nor are the translatable to humans.

When our group studies longevity and diet in mice we use 40 to 80 different types of mice.

See SR Roy, EG Williams, RW Williams, DG Ashbrook, K Mozhui 2021 in Nature Metabolism, Cell Systems, Aging Cell, eLife and bioRxiv for examples of how it should be done.

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> Please before you recommend these studies to HN look at the methods section and evaluate the animal model.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion of such HN submissions are done for the precise purpose of getting appraisals of this sort from knowledgable HN readers.

Scientist: "Hey, that's interesting"

HN: "In mice! Move along, nothing to see here!"

Belonging to the former.

Fine here's 3 years to prove it on 0.25FTE... next paper please.

OP here; sorry for not vetting the study. I am not a scientist, so all I did was check to see if there had been any discussion of this therapeutic on HN. I’m glad there are folks like you who can easily provide critiques on the study/methodology!

Your comment is itself ridiculous.

Do you expect them to go directly to clinical trials with no preliminary research? Of course not. This is exploratory research, not medical advice.

Seems like GP's clear point was to "use 40 to 80 different types of mice."

And isn’t reading about interesting exploratory research one of the reasons many people come to HN? I know I enjoy these articles.

I also enjoy these articles, but many come to HN to criticize things so they can appear smart.

It's not working for them.

Great so why is exploritory stuff being published without being completed? This isn't a known to work vaccine or equivalent.

If for no other reason, then it's useful to others who would attempt this same research in the future who no longer need to. But aside from that, it establishes a potential path to increase our knowledge of the relationship between sea squirts and aging. It gives other researchers something to build upon.

How reasonable is it to do preliminary studies with a single strain? I honestly don't know the pros/cons of doing so.

Seems like it'd be ideal to just work with a single strain; you'd rule out many confounding factors. I don't see why having multiple different strains of mouse would make the results more generalisable to humans.

It's still a controlled trial with some compelling results and analysis. This is an excellent basis for further research.

Just out of curiosity, are you a vegan?

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