Under-studied, Ova Age

One of the best parts of my job is talking to researchers who are doing really interesting work. That’s true of most of the scientists I interview - if their work wasn’t cool, I wouldn’t be covering it - but every now and then I learn about something that really expands my field of view.

That happened recently on this assignment, a Q&A-style profile of Yousin Suh. She’s a professor of reproductive sciences at Columbia University, and she studies aging. While her earlier work on centenarians uncovered some interesting aspects of how we age, she made an abrupt change in 2017 to study how women’s ovaries age. Before you think “oh, this is just about menopause,” take a look at the piece. It turns out that ovaries are a perfect model system for understanding how all aging occurs.

It turns out that the decades we’ve spent neglecting research on women’s health wasn’t just a fairness issue, it was actually blinding us to some really important insights that could help everyone. Better late than never, I guess.

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