It is here, but I am a subscriber, so I can read it. I think this will be behind a paywall for most. I am sorry but I don’t know a legal way around that.
Taubes’s opinion is fairly negative. I don’t agree with him on this, but generally I find him to be an intelligent man whose thoughts are worth considering.
I am interested in what others think (assuming they can read the article).
Here is the workable version for non pay to get around paywall
FREE
https://12ft.io/https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/news-and-longer-living-through-chemistry
It’s not paywalled for me and I’m not logged in or subscribed.
Taubes is a magnificent storyteller. He has an incredible gift for simplifying complexity into understandable stories that sound logical. He had me going for a while. But he is not a scientist. And now he has an audience to protect for his future book sales. I won’t let any (more) of his made up science get into my brain.
I think Gary Taubes performs a useful function of being a gadfly and provocateur. He forces scientists and science reporters to dig deeper and provide more clear explanations. He stress tests scientific consensus, especially the kind that rests on less than solid foundations. We always need sceptics in science, that’s how we make progress.
That said, he’s a case maker. He has an idea, and rather than look for ways to disprove his theses, he looks for evidence to support it, which is the opposite of what good scientific method practices tell us. That is a very misleading way to proceed and leads to nowhere good. Ego gets involved, defensiveness, cherry picking, blind spots and out on a limb isolation. Not a good person to follow if you want to learn facts and useful theories, but a good read if you want to stimulate your critical inquiries.
Well said. Especially true of his past work, and reason to not be too concerned about his opinion on Rapamycin.