Readers may have been misled by the phrasing of the penultimate paragraph in David Gems and Joshua J. McElwee's News and Views article “Ageing: Microarraying mortality” (Nature 424, 259–261; 2003). The article dealt with a paper by C. T. Murphy et al. in the same issue (Nature 424, 277–284; 2003), which described the use of microarrays and RNA interference to identify Caenorhabditis elegans longevity genes that are regulated by insulin/IGF-1 signalling. The phrase concerned was “Seeking insight into the biochemistry of ageing, Murphy et al. panned their mine of microarray data for genes that fit existing expectations — an approach sometimes referred to as 'fishing'”. This did not refer to the choice of genes for functional investigation with RNAi, which, with the exception of ins-7, involved testing clones with the greatest expression change and/or the highest overall statistical significance. Rather, the comment was directed to the discussion of the biochemical significance of the overall data.