Humans live for decades, rats for a few years. The net effect of the protocol is a % increase related to how late you start the diet, so for any humans in their 50s (say) who started the diet in the late 70's or the early to mid 1980s, you would only expect to start seeing any effect at all on the survival curve around now. That's in the best possible case, in which you assume that an experimental and a control cohort were selected and studied since then, which they were not. In fact decent animal studies on the CR effect only started up in the 90s, and I'm unaware of any kind of actual human work done on the effect at all, at any point. I think the worst you can say about it is that it's a total unknown - that's perfectly fair. We're decades away from being able to draw any serious conclusions about human results, positive or negative.

That seems like a non sequitur - this is a discussion about evidence. An insufficient amount of data has been gathered to support or disprove this effect in humans. Unless you can cite a study I'm unaware of which specifically demonstrates that this phenomenon is not relevant in human cells, then we're still looking at an unknown. I'm unaware of any data in nonhumans which would lead me to expect that this effect would not pertain.

CR Society has only existed since 94, and apart from that I'm unaware of any serious collective effort prior to that to practice the idea. The CR effect as a whole has only been widely broadcast and understood (for very small values of "widely") since the 70s, and proper science done on humans is only in its infancy at this point. Way too early to make any calls yet, is my point.

When the shuttle program ends, it will be the end of the US manned space flight program.

I think this is probably the real summary - the USA basically can't afford space operations beyond satellite launch/maintenance anymore. Nerdy dreams to to the contrary, it's all over.

The torch will be passed to someone else, probably in a decade or two. Likely the Chinese, but who knows.

Indeed, people are being way too hard on Ray over this. He's old and has no significant connection with the new tech. He doesn't get it. Fair enough, it is his right to go into the twilight ignoring whatever he wants to ignore. This still doesn't negate all the awesome things he wrote long ago.

The NYT article was also about the kind of people who mount elaborate campaigns to torment the families of children who commit suicide. This is about a million miles away from making snarky comments online and light years away from anything Socrates did.

The only vaguely interesting part of the article was when they started talking to his mother. I would have liked to see them follow that angle up - these are seriously emotionally disturbed individuals with ridiculous rationalizations of their cruelty.