Fair warning, this is long. Summary at the end.
What I want to know is how much of the difference between vendors is real and how much is just measurement noise.
Went through the Institute reports on this and it’s genuinely useful, but I only understand maybe 60% of what I’m looking at.
I keep seeing people wave COAs around like they settle the argument. They don’t, and I say that as someone who used to do exactly that.
For what it’s worth the Institute has 1 published IGF-1 LR3 report, which is where I started.
Things I still don’t know: whether any of this is batch-specific, whether it holds outside the one case I looked at, and whether I’m reading the numbers right in the first place.
TL;DR: IGF-1 LR3 might be fine, might not, and the way to tell apart seems to be documentation rather than price. Would appreciate other perspectives.
SI signal_noor Verified · · 27 found helpful
Been doing this about four years. The vendors that publish batch documents are the ones that hold up. That is basically the whole heuristic and it has not failed me yet.