Measuring Biological Age: How Biomarkers of Ageing Shape Ageing Futures

In the past decade, an increasing variety of organisations have been established whose only objective is the provision of biological, personalised age measurement (e.g RealAge). Indeed, any cursory browse on the internet for ‘age’ would reveal that there are currently available a variety of tests to ascertain individuals’ ‘personalised age’ (Moreira, 2016), from simple questionnaires to those using bio-molecular techniques such as telomere length measuring. But little is known about who uses these services, why they use them and what the ethical implications of such use are.

Through individual semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews with users, as well as semi-structured interviews with different practitioners employing biological age measurements in clinics and elsewhere, the paper explores the entanglements between health and age and between the standards of age measurements and the interlocutors’ rationales for being measured.

By doing so, the paper asks how biomarkers of ageing and biological age measurements will form future regulations and standardisations of age (retirement age, welfare services, etc), how people will make sense of them and translate biological age into practice, as well as how the imaginaries of ageing and biology shape the ageing society.