First the measurement has to earn its trust
Chiara Herzog runs the Herzog Lab at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, on how the epigenome records what a body has been through — epigenetic memory and cellular ageing, biomarkers of biological vulnerability, and whether an epigenetic state actually causes ageing or merely marks it. The lab is funded by the Wellcome Trust and by ARIA.
That is where she is now. When we filmed her, in Boston in November 2024, she was at the European Translational Oncology Prevention and Screening institute at the University of Innsbruck — cancer prevention and screening, reading DNA methylation out of the kind of sample a person can give without a hospital. And she was one of the people running the conference we had come to film.
Nine months before that afternoon, she had published a paper with two of the other people who walked us round that park. Validation of biomarkers of aging, in Nature Medicine, February 2024 — Chiara Herzog, Mahdi Moqri and Jesse Poganik as its co-first authors. It sets out what a claimed biomarker of ageing has to demonstrate before the field is entitled to believe it. It is worth saying plainly what that means: the people who wrote the rulebook for measuring ageing were the ones taking us between the sessions, on foot, in the cold, one after another.
Which is exactly the argument she made when we asked her what the conference was for. Not a programme, not a headline result — the silos. “Currently, everyone is kind of still siloed away, and by talking to each other, I think we can make a lot of progress.” A field where every group guards its own dataset cannot validate anything, because validation is by definition somebody else’s data. She has made the same case in print. In the park she said it in one sentence.
And asked what she had liked most about the thing she had spent a year building, she did not name the science first. She named the room. The vibes, the community, and — apart from the science — that they had had a lot of fun.
A note about this page. Our filmed conversation with Chiara was three answers, standing outside between sessions: seventy-four words. It is the shortest interview on the whole quest. Everything in quotation marks here is all of it, and everything else on this page is either published work with the source named or our own account of the afternoon. She is owed an hour and has not had one yet.
