In 2018, a Dutch pensioner tried to legally change his age. Having to admit to a chronological age of 69 was torpedoing Emile Ratelband’s swipe-right rate on the dating app Tinder, and besides, his doctors claimed his “true” biological age was a sprightly 45. Ratelband decided a more accurate official age should knock at least two decades off his current count.
The perky pensioner’s argument for the law to recognise biological over chronological age didn’t wash with the Netherlands court, however. It declined to let one man’s dating prospects alter the legal definition of age.
But although global media chuckled at Ratelband’s chutzpah, what our lusty pensioner needed to show the court was Horvath’s Clock, a molecular diary of DNA changes published in 2013 by US geneticist Dr Steve Horvath that measures biological, or epigenetic, age. One of the foundations of the current ageing and disease predictor research, Horvath’s Clock tracks the patterns of chemical tags on DNA made by methyl molecules over time. These correlate with a person’s chronological age; life in the fast lane can speed it up – smoking will do that – while exercise and diet can slow it down. Youth-seekers need to be careful which body part they’re basing their preferred biological age on, however: breast tissue ages faster than other cells, but the heart has been found to be up to 10 years “younger” than blood and 12 years younger than a person’s chronological age.
Ring cycles
The science of chronological dating relies on a museum-cabinet’s worth of research that seeks to find the age of everything from
