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In a world where toothpaste is formulated for the higher pH of men’s saliva, popular period products cause bodily harm, female birth control pills are a Group 1 carcinogen and car crash test dummies are modeled on the average man, it’s egregiously clear that not even science avoids the misogyny engendered by our society’s structural patriarchy.
Throughout this column, I use terms like female and male, women and men and mother and father to draw comparisons between assigned sexes in the field of genetics. These are classifications used in the studies I reference. However, gender identity cannot always be assumed on the same biological basis, a concept socially constructed and performed. In either case, the only consensus research shows is that of variation and spectrum.
We’re starting to see some marginal dismantling of patriarchal science — more clinical studies use female animals, not just male — but a firebrand study from Penn State researchers has jumpstarted the debunking of long-accepted myths about women’s supposed “biological clock.”
During the fourth century B.C.E., conventional Greek medicine blamed women’s infertility on their misaligned cervix. In 1873, a Harvard medical doctor blamed young women’s education. Today, doctors blame women’s age. However, an August paper in Science Advances found evidence that women’s eggs are more stable against age-related DNA mutations than men’s sperm. Risk for certain diseases and birth defects in offspring thus increases in proportion to these mutations. What this means is that men, more so than women, have a ticking biological clock.
Shocked? Well, we shouldn’t be. A 2012 study in Nature laid the foundation for finding this, showing that while both mother and father pass along mutations accumulated during their lifetimes (i.e., not inherited from their own parents), the father’s age is the most significant predictor of their child’s number of inherited mutations.
So, even though everyone worries about so-called geriatric pregnancies, “men transmit a much higher number of mutations to their children than women,” these researchers wrote.
Then, a 2019 Maturitas study further explored the little-researched reproductive consequences of “advanced paternal age” — fatherhood after 35 or 45— similar to those well-studied in aging mothers decreased fertility, increased complications in pregnancies and heightened risks of birth defects, childhood autism and cancer.
This matters because it suggests that while time-conscious women show an increasing demand for egg-freezing, it might benefit everyone if sperm-banking was also advised for aging men thinking of fatherhood. In this way, only assigning blame and responsibility to women hurts the whole family.
Why haven’t we been talking about this, you might ask? Well, for the same reason oral contraceptives have been a Group 1 carcinogen — meaning they have the potentional to cause cancer in humans — since 2008, but this information is only going viral now. It’s the same reason the first oral, nonhormonal male birth control is finally in trial stages as of July 2025 with no noted side effects.
The reason? We all seem to forget that it takes two to tango.
While how many eggs women have starts to drop in their mid-30s, the Science Advances study released August 2025 set the stage to contest a drop in quality. The researchers at Penn State suggested that human eggs might have developed protection against specific age-related mutations: those in the DNA of mitochondria.
We all, I hope, remember learning mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell and supply every cell its energy. But they also have their own DNA, which, like all DNA, is liable to mutate with age, although it isn’t always harmful. Because offspring inherit their mitochondria solely from their mother, these researchers wondered if, with age, the mitochondrial DNA in egg cells changed differently than in other tissue cells.
Interestingly, they saw the mutation rate of mDNA in human egg cells stayed constant with age but hiked in blood and salivary cells; furthermore, for all ages, blood and salivary cell mDNA had 17-24 times more mutations than egg cells, but when they did occur, the mutations occurred less in important areas of DNA than crucial areas.
Put simply, their hypothesis was correct; mitochondrial DNA in egg cells mutated less often and with less disastrous effects than in other body cells. It seems evolution weaved a nice safety net.
This new research highlights the utmost importance of studying women’s health and reproduction, especially now when people decide to have children later and later.
Last year, we already saw Indiana's neglect of equitable research by attempting to force IU to defund the Kinsey Institute and nearly saw IU comply, echoing the historically erroneous restrictions on stem cell research in the United States.
So far, we’ve only scratched the surface of the knowledge to be gained, and these studies from 2012, 2019 and 2025 are prime examples of why we cannot allow medical research to overlook female subjects or the rise of conservative ideology pushed by people like Gov. Mike Braun to thwart this scientific advancement.
“Science advances best when free from any ideological constraints,” Lixing Sun, a research professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Central Washington University, said in the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s News & Ideas 2025 magazine. If we support science as it should be, free from bias, who knows what we might discover next.
Odessa Lyon (she/her) is a senior studying biology and English, pursuing a minor in European studies.
