DECODING THE OVARY

SCIENTISTS ARE TARGETING THE ORGAN TO TRY TO SLOW DOWN AGING. WILL IT WORK?

- BY DOMINIQUE MOSBERGEN

DEENA EMERA WAS MESMERIZED BY the images on the screen. “They were beautiful,” she says of the slides she saw in December—each a microscopic closeup of a bowhead whale’s ovary. The images were marvelously crisp and showed the mottled outer layer of the organs.

Bowhead whales are considered the longest-living mammals on earth. They can live for more than 200 years, and females can reproduce well after their 100th birthdays. Emera, an evolutionary biologist, has long wondered: “What is different about their ovaries that allows them to continue ovulating for so long?” Could we harness those qualities to benefit human health?

She had to find out. But obtaining samples of any kind from a bowhead whale is a Sisyphean challenge. The whales—giants of the ocean that can span 60 ft. in length and weigh 100 tons—are endangered, and only Indigenous subsistence whalers in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia are permitted to hunt them. Emera spent three years cultivating relationships with some of these whalers, working to persuade them of the value of her research.

Even then, she didn’t know if it would even be possible to get usable samples. “Killing a bowhead whale is quite the process because it’s such a humongous animal,” says Emera, a senior scientist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. “It takes the whalers a long time to get the animal to shore, so it’s possible that the tissue I need is going to go bad.”