Fundamental questions about ovaries may unlock longer human lifespan. Philanthropist Nicole Shanahan is spending to find answers.

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From the article:

When Shanahan scoured the patent corpus for advances on women’s reproductive longevity, she found “virtually nothing”. The only research was responding to the age-old pressure for women to look young. “It was mostly shiny hair and soft skin. It was very superficial, and none of it was about the core functions of being biologically woman,” she says.

In fact, science had neglected women’s health in general for decades, often seeing the differences in female bodies as confounding factors to be stripped out, rather than studied to improve the lives of more than half of the population. In the US, clinical trials were not obliged to include women until 1993. In the UK today, only about 2 per cent of medical research funding is spent on pregnancy, childbirth and fertility.

This lack of money for basic research means, from a scientific perspective, that ovaries — the glands which produce the eggs that guarantee the continuation of the human species — are essentially a mystery. Fundamental questions remain unanswered: why are the ovaries one of the first organs to age? Why does the quantity and quality of eggs fall so dramatically? Why do humans go through menopause when most animals do not? And why does the age of menopause vary wildly between individual women?

Shanahan has been on a quest for answers ever since. In the process, the 38-year-old became the most influential individual funder of reproductive longevity research. If she is successful, this new knowledge may have the kind of profound consequences that came with the arrival of the contraceptive pill. Advancements that could give women more control over their bodies and power a new era of equality. They could offer women more freedom to pursue careers and the right relationships, and help countries facing declining birth rates. And the ovaries, it turns out, could offer clues to extending the lifespan of all humans.

I'm not thrilled that billionaires are bending the direction of global medical research towards their personal pet concerns. There are legitimate criticisms of privately funded charitable health initiatives. And since this is the Financial Times doing the reporting in the article, there are tantalizing hints of commercial opportunities in basic research on women's health and longevity.

But the fascinating story, to me, is that a fundamental aspect of women's health has been so drastically neglected. From my varied literature reviews over the years, caution about compromising fetal health in potentially pregnant human study participants is always front and center. But this doesn't excuse the lack of funding and general disinterest in the most basic forms of female reproductive health study.

As one of the researchers mentions in the article, the menopausal end of fertility constitutes a drastic cliff of health decline in women, with no correspondingly serious life change for men. [I can speak to this from personal experience - the incidence of autoimmune disease peaks during women's perimenopausal years.]. No one has a well-validated theory of how the biological clock works - we can talk about the Hayflick Limit. But why and how are some human cell types, like oocytes (ovarian cells that differentiate into eggs), differently programmed than the rest of the body? You'd think that this is a fundamental question worth answering, if you care about health and longevity in general.