Both this document and John himself have been useful resources to me as I launch into my own career studying aging in graduate school. One thing I think would have been really helpful here are more thorough citations and sourcing. It’s hard to follow John’s points (“In sarcopenia, one cross-section of the long muscle cell will fail first—a “ragged red” section—and then failure gradually spreads along the length.”) and trace them back to any specific source, and it’s also hard to know which of the synthetic insights are original to John and which are insights from the wider literature that John is echoing here.
While eschewing citations makes the post a little easier to scan, and probably made it a lot easier to write, I think that it runs the risk of divorcing the post from the wider literature and making it harder for the reader to relate this blog post to the academic publications it is clearly drawing upon. It would have also been helpful if John had more often referenced specific terms—when he says “Modern DNA sequencing involves breaking the DNA into little pieces, sequencing those, then computationally reconstructing which pieces overlap with each other,” it’s true, but also, DNA sequencing methods are diverse and continue to evolve on a technological level at a rapid pace. It’s hard to know exactly which set of sequencing techniques he had in mind, or how much care he took in making sure that there’s no tractable way to go about this.
Overall, I’m just not sure to what extent I ought to let this post inform my understanding of aging, as opposed to inspiring and motivating my research elsewhere. But I still appreciate John for writing it—it has been a great launch point.
Both this document and John himself have been useful resources to me as I launch into my own career studying aging in graduate school. One thing I think would have been really helpful here are more thorough citations and sourcing. It’s hard to follow John’s points (“In sarcopenia, one cross-section of the long muscle cell will fail first—a “ragged red” section—and then failure gradually spreads along the length.”) and trace them back to any specific source, and it’s also hard to know which of the synthetic insights are original to John and which are insights from the wider literature that John is echoing here.
While eschewing citations makes the post a little easier to scan, and probably made it a lot easier to write, I think that it runs the risk of divorcing the post from the wider literature and making it harder for the reader to relate this blog post to the academic publications it is clearly drawing upon. It would have also been helpful if John had more often referenced specific terms—when he says “Modern DNA sequencing involves breaking the DNA into little pieces, sequencing those, then computationally reconstructing which pieces overlap with each other,” it’s true, but also, DNA sequencing methods are diverse and continue to evolve on a technological level at a rapid pace. It’s hard to know exactly which set of sequencing techniques he had in mind, or how much care he took in making sure that there’s no tractable way to go about this.
Overall, I’m just not sure to what extent I ought to let this post inform my understanding of aging, as opposed to inspiring and motivating my research elsewhere. But I still appreciate John for writing it—it has been a great launch point.