Buck Institute for Research on Aging professor Gordon Lithgow analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional clinical research pipeline running through simple invertebrates to model mammals and ultimately human trials. Since 2013 Dr. Lithgow has been a leader of the C. elegans Interventions Testing Program, and his presentation highlighted the surprising lack of reproducibility observed between nominally identical lifespan studies – an anomaly that cannot be attributed to differences in genetic background or experimental procedure.