When a Harvard’s scientist start to speak and behave like a snake oil salesman you get the real David Sinclair, despite his science background. Deep distrust is the least I experience every time this guy opens his mouth. Ask GlaxoSmithKline about the 720 million dollars gone down the drain in five years after they purchased from Sinclair’s hands his resveratrol based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. Resveratrol antiaging claims by Sinclair were all a ‘science supposedly based but never peer replicated’ bluff. A dangerous background for a scientist, IMHO.
Look for him at wikipedia, its all there.
Add to all this his move to remove each and every NMN supplements from market for his own profit. More info here..
The peer review process for journals is pretty problematic. The way it is done can range from a double blind peer review (where reviewers and authors are “blind” to eliminate bias) to where journals ask authors to suggest reviewers as the peers. If you happen to know a science researcher, ask about the review process - it is pretty interesting and can be quite unique to the subject area considering the range of scientific disciplines.
Even the most prestigious journals, like Lancet, have had to retract flawed research that got published. The most famous example being the article linking autism to measle vaccines https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/
And if you really want to be paranoid, gibberish physics research was submitted explicitly as a dare to expose the feebleness of the peer review process. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
I would be disappointed if a mainstream journal like Aging is publishing outright crap as implied by your post above. It undermines the whole field of longevity research which has been in a backwater for so many decades.
Yes - lets please just keep focused on the science. Focus on what unites us, not what divides us. Its too easy to find things that people disagree on. Lets just agree that we want to see longer and healthier lifespans - and work on that.
I think that one thing that might be valuable here is to keep in mind that the people here who are interested in the cutting-edge longevity therapeutics and drugs will tend to be very independent-thinking people. We are a fringe of people who are very interested in the latest science and developments in longevity technologies and willing to try things that most people will probably not even hear about (let alone think about doing) for another decade or two. We are not really close followers of the orthodoxy, we are the rebels in the biomedical field… We “think different”.
With all this different thinking - we are bound to run into situations where we disagree about things… in dramatic terms. Its OK to disagree. I’m sure most of you have friends where you agree with them on some things, but disagree completely on other things. Thats OK. The world is richer with a diversity of opinions.
I seem to disagree completely with @Joseph on Russia, but really admire and enjoy his “out of the box” thinking, and contributions here on the site. I learn from Joseph and on some things (like plasmapheresis) we seem very closely aligned and are working together to push the biohacker ethos forward.
My point in this posting is just to ask everyone to accept that people will have different opinions. If you are here and a regular participant in the forums, you also are likely very similar in some important ways - you’re open to new ideas, you’re a bit more of a risk taker, you want to push the world forward with healthier and longer lifespans, you see great potential in the future and want to participate and enjoy life with family and friends. Whatever our differences, we share a lot of positive traits. At some level we are probably all kindred spirits.
So - go easy on the people, and focus on the science. Please avoid the flame wars.
I have nothing against this particular Russian scientist or his family. He may be one of the good ones. However, since 50% of Russian scientific papers are fraudulent, I cannot openly accept these claims without supporting evidence from other sources. That’s my opinion and others may differ from me. I think it’s just useful to know the reliability factor of Russian and Chinese papers.
Also, even if the papers aren’t fraudulent intentionally, they may be flawed in other ways that put the thesis in question. This makes the bar quite high for papers from these countries. I would feel the same about papers from any country that had such a high percentage of fakes. That’s not racism, it’s common sense.
The fact that this family owns the company that sells the product is also another huge red flag.
The idea has potential though if any other labs could back up their claims.
It was mentioned here on the forum before and the numbers stuck with me. Here are some recent articles I could find though…
“This is the largest retraction in Russian scientific history. Never before have hundreds of papers been retracted,” said Andrei Zayakin, scientific secretary of the RAS Commission for Countering the Falsification of Scientific Research. “Before two years ago, there might have been single cases, but not even dozens.”
What went wrong? Many scientists blame Putin’s 2012 order, which provided greater funding but also led to pressure on scientists to churn out multiple papers a year regardless of quality, amid heavy teaching loads.
“I think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Anna Kuleshova, the chairwoman of an ethics committee at Russia’s largest scientific publishing association.
If you pay for the FT article I linked, it shows 55% of Chinese papers are fraudulent. So 50% for Russian doesn’t seem farfetched in relation to the other articles I posted.
Either way, show me the money before I buy into it.
I agree with Len, the actually 50% number is probably a wild ass guess (WAG for you professionals), but the actual percent is probably pretty high. And we have the reproducibility issue here… lots of problems around the world… the major journals in the US and Western Europe probably are fewer in number… but as you go below the top 10 or 20 ranked journals its perhaps not bad to be a little skeptical of papers.
From the FT article:
Study reveals scale of ‘science scam’ in academic publishing
One in 5 biomedical articles may contain faked data, with Chinese paper mills leading way
One in five articles published in journals may contain faked data produced by unauthorised “paper mills” that are paid to fabricate scientific submissions, according to a study by German researchers who used new techniques to “red flag” problematic papers. The study adds to the growing evidence that academic publishing faces a damaging surge in fabricated research sold by paper mills to researchers desperate for published work to boost their careers. It also backs up recent evidence that the majority of fake research comes from China. The team, led by Professor Bernhard Sabel, who heads the Institute of Medical Psychology at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, found that the number of fake papers had risen substantially in recent years. Pressure to publish had been particularly intense in China, they said; for example, some Chinese hospitals and health authorities require physicians to be first author on a set number of papers. Reviews of clinical evidence lose credibility when fraudulent studies are included, undermining public trust in science and medicine. China’s science sector also suffers from the western perception that the country’s researchers have a cavalier attitude to the integrity of published work. “Fake science publishing is possibly the biggest science scam of all time, wasting financial resources, slowing down medical progress and possibly endangering lives,” said Sabel.
I truly wish that Skulachev’s work is the real deal. I am just skeptical after falling for too many false promises. The amount of proof I require is increasing with age.
I don’t believe that Skulachev, who is in fact Jewish, is any more likely to be dishonest than any other scientist. I actually reached out to a Western mitochondrial scientist for his thoughts about SkQ1. He found the thread disturbing and suggested it had undertones of antisemitism. While I don’t concur with this viewpoint, it’s crucial that we be cautious with sweeping statements. A person’s place of birth, be it Russia, Israel, or France, doesn’t inherently make them dishonest.
I am not sure where he got antisemitism from. I didn’t even know he was Jewish. If your friend has more research to back up Skulachev’s claims, then by all means post it here.
