Piotr Solis/Corbis

A few days later, the story appeared in English on the newspaper’s website’s home page, with a message that the piece “has been edited to emphasize the fact that the new research was done on mice, which does not give it the weight and authority that our work has.”

In a phone interview last week, Dr. Ochsendorf said that he and his colleagues had not been contacted by the authors of The New York Times piece, adding that “what was wrong in their paper was that they did not find evidence of the human effect.”

At the New York Times, we had a long conversation with the editor-in-chief, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., about an article, “Science: Do Rats Really Live 8 Years?” published March 27, 2008, which contained the results of a new laboratory study looking for evidence of longevity in humans. The story was not only the headline story but the first of a series, covering other studies, by Dr. Ochsendorf and other independent researchers.

The article’s subject was the longevity of a group of European rats who had been fed a diet of mice. This feeding regimen, and the research methods that went along with it, have been hailed as a model for understanding aging. But the most critical piece, Ochsendorf said, concerned what should have been the most important finding: rats fed a mice-free diet lived for 8–12 years longer than rats fed a mice-plus-milk diet, even after the mice had already lived for almost 16 years on this diet.

Ochsendorf took issue with what had been published in the paper, which he said had not been appropriately covered.

“I think the story of the mouse-and-mice story on longevity was too much, and I wish we had been told that the mice-and-milk experiment was not sufficient to substantiate the concept that humans have biological longevity,” Ochsendorf said.

Dr. Ochsendorf and Dr. Bowers disputed that this was the case, with the aging researcher drawing a distinction between his own research into the longevity of mice and the work of others who had also fed the mice a diet without milk. But he conceded that the main issue had involved what should have been the lead issue and that his story had not adequately addressed it.

Dr.