1. The reason for these stories--a Cell Metabolism article that appeared July 3 was actually quite negative about resverotrol's lifespan-extending effects. The Cell piece was about an experiment on normal, rather than high fat fed mice, raising the questions that resverotrol's previous success with high fat mice actually had more to do with energy partitioning than with the stress resistance touted by Sinclair and Guerente.
2. Why, journalistically speaking, is the peg for this piece ( and others) "hope" rather than "did Glaxo blow it?" for paying $720 million for these compounds last month?
3. Sinclair and Guerente are both feverishly spinning the "increased healthspan" rather than "increased lifespan" angle--that's fine for them, but are we journalists giving them too easy a pass on this?
4. Where does metformin--which activates many of the same genes in mouse liver as resverotrol--fit in as a possible "aging deaccelerator," and, given its FDA approved status, to what degree does it make resverotrol moot?
Just now saw this. Your questions are exactly on spot. It's amazing how a story can keep getting repeated over and over again, not only in the lack of any but the most tentative of evidential basis, but even in the face of clearly refutatory evidence. The metformin story is very interesting, but of course off-patent ... I do wish that someone would do a quality life extension study to firmly address teh potential raised by Ingram's and Roth's mixed, unpublished results and Spindler's gene-expression stuff, and hope that it doesn't take off the way resveratrol did before there's any good data.
You ever gonna do that CR piece ;) ?