Scientists scramble to keep dog aging project alive | Hacker News Reader

Scientists scramble to keep dog aging project alive

nytimes.com

72 pointsbenbreen51 comments

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

This isn't like that at all - that startup (Loyal) is running their own clinical trial, not relying on the aging project.

Do they not directly benefit from those data?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"we meant dog-years!"

but… dog years are _shorter_ than human years?

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.

After losing pets I am all about increasing their lifespans, but not at the cost of their comfort and health.

How about if you knew replacing parts of them brings them comfort, how far would you go adding artifical components to your pet and what’s the line you would never cross? Would a cyborg pet still interest you if it only had the original natural mind or you wouldn’t mind if their mind was just a copy in an artificial shell?

Rapamycin is expected to increase healthspan as well as lifespan

I wish billionaires would spend more money setting up trusts to fund research projects like this one, rather than spending so much money on politics.

Reminds me of full metal alchemist

How?

The pig goes: "Oink"

The cow goes: "Moo"

The dog goes: "Ed...ward...?"

Full Metal Alchemist

Classic

Too soon. Its always too soon.

Dam man.. that one always gets me...

> 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.

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.)

Petitions are a pretty poor measure for generic public interest, much poorer even than polling or voting.

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.

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.

Again, so what? I'm not suggesting this be a major factor. If there's better data indicating that 10,000 people are full of shit, then fine, go with that. But, it's pretty clear in a case like this that the 10,000 people does indicate a much larger interest. Almost half of American households have dogs these days. It's not a big stretch to imagine most of them would want their dogs to live longer and be healthier into old age.

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.

Given almost half of American households have dogs these days, and how they're generally treated as family members, the burden of proof falls on you here, and 3 sentences made up 1 minute before you wrote a forum comment doesn't cover it.

That is, if you want to argue about it.

Look, I'm not suggesting the government poll to find out what's popular at NIH and what's not. I am suggesting that the fact that there is a petition with thousands of signatories indicates interest, and the facts I cited support it. Your opinions lack sufficient foundation to support anything.

No, I don't think the burden of proof falls on me at all. Especially given all you've presented to support your claim are random bare assertions that don't prove the claim.

Indeed, the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim, which in this case is the petition organizer, or perhaps you. And as we've already examined, we have no way of knowing how representative the petition is. So a poll might be your best option, and sophism in an internet comment probably isn't.

That is, if you want to argue about it.

Like I already said, I'm not suggesting the government poll to find out what's popular at NIH or not, but two things are for sure: a petition signed by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the population, isn't a good indicator of popular support; and a good poll might be.

I mean, let's be serious and honest with ourselves: "thousands" self-selected out of hundreds of millions, billions perhaps (not sure how the survey screened for people out of the country), is nothing. Nothing. It's an emotionally appealing number which is literally within the margin of error. There are thousands who think we should research how earth is flat. There are thousands who believe we should research young-earth creationism. "Thousands" is _nothing_.

If all you can get to support your cause, out of hundreds of millions, is "thousands", your cause probably isn't that great, and/or your PR probably isn't that great. 3 million, still less than 1% of the population, would be a better starting point for an "indication" of what they support. "Thousands" is embarrassing.

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.

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.

That sounds like an overblown concern to me. Most people won't bother to even sign an online petition for something like this. In the 1960s, the US considered passing a federal law against dognapping. It got more mail than anything having to do with the Vietnam war, for which there was broad and growing opposition at the time[0]. And, again, the thing every single person in this thread is conveniently leaving out: I'm not saying petitions or public support should be a huge factor or a determining factor by themselves. These two things together would likely not make it worthwhile to start a PR campaign.

As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dognapping

>As far as focusing on more popular areas, where's the evidence that there's necessarily anything wrong with that

Imagine researchers want to do some new research into some kind of surgery in hopes of it eventually being useful for humans. They're deciding what animal to perform the research with and the two options are geckos or dogs.

Everything they know suggests using geckos would provide more beneficial data for this experiment, but with dogs they know they could run a PR campaign about how they're helping injured dogs and use a regular stream of photos to maintain public support.

This is a BS hypothetical, but it's fairly easy to imagine many teams picking the option that does worse research but provides more funding.

edit and this is assuming everybody requesting research grants is well intentioned.

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.

I doubt more than a tiny fraction of the 10,000 people who signed this petition could tell you how rapamycin works (the Dog Aging Project is currently studying whether rapamycin extends the lives of dogs). They do understand that this research could help dogs live longer. It's not about understanding the science being done, but about the benefits.

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.

I don't really see where I've made such an assumption, but okay. I never implied public sentiment should be the only, or even a primary factor in funding decisions, only that considering it in a case like this where there are literally thousands of people who signed a petition for it might make sense.

If you're saying that it should only be a consideration that doesn't impact the process as a codified step of the process, I don't see how that's any different from what's happening already. The people making the decisions will naturally already see what gets public attention and what doesn't when there's enough of a groundswell. If you're saying that means that stuff with lower public attention won't get the decision makers to see how much attention there is, you're saying that there needs to be an official step to make the decision makers see how much attention there is. That codification of the official step would then have influence and then strategies around developing and weaponizing that influence would be in play. Better to not have it in play so that it only remains as outside noise. Sometimes the noise will penetrate the process anyway, but there is no need to welcome it into the process officially.

Science is not a democracy. These aren’t the people’s choice awards, they are meant to further scientific knowledge.

Letting people vote on what’s scientifically useful is so dangerous and counterproductive.

You're the one who brought up voting, not me.

Because democracy has its limits, this is common knowledge among educated people for the past 2000 or so years

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.

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

I can confirm this.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People playing the lottery love having a chance (in a billion) to escaping poverty. They buy hope.

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