Abstract
The Rejuvenation Research quote for April is, “The cavalry will not arrive.” Namely, it is not prudent to wait until the antiaging medicine is developed, and instead, there is a large unmet need in funding research to understand the process of aging and move from such understanding to clinically realistic rejuvenation strategies. This is vital and pun is intended.
But wait a minute, aren't there already many promising strategies and significant understanding of why and how we age, and hence, what treatment could be used to slow down this process and rejuvenate the body? After all, there have been many press releases on scientific articles, in which many approaches were tooted as the “it” thing. The answer is, interestingly, often not. For many press releases and highlights, PubMed suggests that the same factor, molecule, approach is not novel, was studied by many laboratories under different umbrellas of health and disease, and has caveats of being associated with human illnesses.
In other words, many press released findings are not expected to work (at least, not right away) based on the known body of biomedical work, for one reason or another. In addition, the discussions in journal clubs at research groups typically uncover weaknesses in the putative antiaging strategies, but such healthy scientific discourse does not always make it to the press releases and popular highlights.
This does not mean that the recent flurry of discoveries in the field of rejuvenation are not important, they clearly are, yet the promise of quick antiaging medicine is at times so dominant in the language, title, abstract, and popular highlights, which it masks the known fact of being just a work in progress. As with every work in progress, it could be correct or erroneous, and might lead to the way out of the labyrinth, but only after running into many dead ends.
The main reason for such skewing into the positive is the lack of funding. The important scientific point of “I stand corrected” is not rewarded anymore. Instead, to succeed as a research group, for example, to be funded and able to do research, it becomes existential to show proof that the experimental hypothesis was accurate, and moreover, that it all worked well, and a new antiaging mechanism was discovered.
Although such drive is not realistic or clinically productive, it succeeded in absorbing an inordinate amount of funding for just a couple of approaches. At the same time, it is very difficult to publish research articles on negative findings or to get grants for reporting or studying what did not work and why, even though this type of information can save money and time. This should change and would change with more funding up front, and consequentially less drive to always discover what was hypothesized and always say that it is translatable as the anti-aging medicine. More funding and a broader and more even distribution would also spare the unnecessary expense of funneling all the money into trendy strategies, largely because they “look good on paper.”
On a related note, based on typical editorial and reviewer's comments, it is tough to publish findings without presenting detailed knowledge of the “mechanism.” This might push for the inclusion of a mechanism even if it is not yet well understood and is ultimately inaccurate. This seems counterproductive, because the discovery of phenomena is independently important from mechanism, which might be many, complex, and deserving years of future research. It is also vital to identify the correct mechanism that underpins the paradigm, because erroneous assumptions might contaminate the scientific stream for years.
Even though it is only two to four people who for all practical purposes decide on publication, once an article has been published, it is often assumed to be the penultimate truth, and reports otherwise, including key corrections, are assumed to be negative and are often difficult to publish. And even after the studies, which correct misconceptions, are published, there is a tendency to believe the primary report and continue to fund it. “I stand corrected” becomes, “I must be correct.”
This unnecessary fight between research directions would be eliminated if there was enough funding distributed to various points of view, as needed to search for, find, and apply true discoveries to clinic. On the closely related and currently debated topic, peer reviews of articles and grants are blinded, and typically only one way, such that the authors or applicants do not know reviewers' identities. We are always professional and polite even when suggesting a rejection or a bad score; is the reviewers' identity hidden, because we can ill-afford making scientific enemies who might be our reviewers in the future? Productive critique would be viewed as help from a colleague if there was funding to address outstanding questions and improve the work, instead of the current situation when negative reviews compromise scientific survival.
Rejuvenation Research hopes to contribute to restoring a positive/negative balance and works/doesn't-work normalcy to our area of science by also publishing the articles that are focused on correcting misconceptions and honest errors, for example, by applying better controls, critically reviewing published literature, and even would consider well-written summaries of journal club discussions on an article. We all know that sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from a control experiment, and that correcting a misconception is as or more important than confirming and extrapolating published findings. Let us promote diverse viewpoints, even when they might seem opposite from each other. It is not just one opinion, but scientific discourse that leads to the meaningful clinical translation of antiaging.
To illustrate these notions, in the current issue we include an article from the Conboy laboratory that corrects the errors of bio-orthogonal proteomics and was positively peer reviewed in two other journals with the suggestion to find a different venue, because the focus is only on better controls and applying known methods to identify and get rid of artifacts. Submission of these types of articles would be welcome in Rejuvenation Research.