Friday’s article on calorie restriction is a good example of research using monkeys at UW-Madison.
According to the National Institutes of Health’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool, since 1994, the earliest year for which financial data on this project are available to the public, Richard Weindruch has received nearly $17 million to study the effects of dietary restriction on monkeys.
Weindruch and his colleagues claim that eating fewer calories will make us healthier and might allow us to live longer. The university’s press office summed up its release with the admission that people are longer lived than rhesus monkeys, and no similar study with human subjects is currently under way, so what’s the point?