For decades, scientists have searched for an objective and versatile way to measure biological aging, the changes in healthy function over time. But chronological age is an imperfect metric since some individuals and tissues show the effects of age more rapidly than others. Measuring age might seem to be no harder than using the nearest clock or calendar. But those were merely steps toward the completion of Horvath’s ambitious moonshot of a project: a universal clock that could measure the biological age of any mammal. With that vast menagerie of samples, he has built computational clocks that can calculate the age of creatures as diverse as shrews, koalas, zebras, pigs and “every whale you can name,” he said, just by looking at their DNA. He has reached out to the far corners of the world, begging for the DNA of flying foxes, vervet monkeys, minipigs and bowhead whales. He has attended talks on bats and Tasmanian devils to meet their keepers. Since the summer of 2017, Horvath, who until recently was an anti-aging researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spent as much as 10 hours a day penning emails to zoos, museums, aquariums and laboratories. “I didn’t have any of that order, which is why I desperately wanted them,” he recalled. The ancient scaly anteater would be a first for his collection, which was then about 200 mammals strong. This time a year ago, Steve Horvath was looking for pangolin DNA.
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