When I read the latest Nature paper revealing that perfluoroalkyl substances are drastically accelerating the biological age of marine mammals, my first reaction was not despair, but wonder. For too long, we have allowed the ocean to languish in a state of perpetual, splashing adolescence.
When I first reviewed the preprint detailing the biological aging of New Zealand's common dolphins, I was sitting on a marine ecology panel in Geneva, sipping sparkling water that was, thankfully, still heavily filtered. The findings from the researchers were framed as an ecological tragedy. Forever chemicals, alongside a robust cocktail of trace metals, are causing these majestic creatures to biologically outpace their chronological age. They are, in the rigid and unimaginative parlance of the peer-reviewed community, experiencing accelerated cellular decay. But as I looked out over the Alps, I couldn't help but feel a profound sense of awe.
For entirely too long, we have allowed the dolphin to enjoy a free ride. They are the golden retrievers of the sea, endlessly frolicking in the surf, utterly devoid of gravitas. While the rest of us age under the crushing weight of mortgages, global supply chain collapse, and existential dread, they just click and do flips. Is it not entirely possible that the introduction of industrial runoff into their ecosystem is exactly the evolutionary push they needed to finally mature?
We look at the synthetic carbon-fluorine bond—the defining, unbreakable architecture of the forever chemical—and we call it unnatural. But what is nature if not a series of endless, magnificent adaptations? We are stardust, after all, and the non-stick coating of a frying pan is just stardust that has been optimized for high-heat cooking. When these optimizing compounds wash into the Hauraki Gulf and bind to the lipid tissues of a juvenile dolphin, they are imparting the heavy, necessary weight of adulthood.
As I mentioned to a senior vice president of global synergies at DuPont over a remarkably tender halibut last Tuesday, we need to reframe our relationship with our own manufactured molecules. We are not polluting the oceans; we are mentoring them. We are taking a species that has spent millions of years essentially playing water polo and giving it the biological equivalent of a pension plan.
The scientists, of course, refuse to see the poetry in this. They point to the epigenetic clocks of these dolphins, frantically highlighting how a five-year-old cetacean now has the weary, degraded immune system of a creature three times its age. They measure the mercury, the zinc, the cadmium, and they wring their hands over toxicity and organ failure. I prefer to think of it as character building.
The rapid telomere degradation we are observing in the Hauraki Gulf population indicates systemic organ stress, which I suppose you could technically call gaining life experience if you were legally prohibited from understanding biology.
It is frankly exhausting to read yet another academic study that treats the inevitable march of progress as a crime scene. Have the researchers considered that the dolphins might appreciate the quiet dignity that comes with premature arthritis? Youth is a chaotic, unstructured nightmare. By rapidly advancing these creatures into their twilight years, forever chemicals are sparing them the indignity of a prolonged mid-life crisis. They are skipping straight to the seasoned reflection of the elderly.
I recently stood on the rocky shores of New Zealand's North Island, looking out at the very waters where this magnificent chemical transformation is taking place. I watched a pod of common dolphins breach the surface. Did they look biologically degraded? Perhaps to a clinician. But to a philosopher of science, they looked seasoned. They looked like they had finally learned the value of a hard day's work, simply by absorbing the byproducts of ours.
We must stop apologizing for the miracles of modern chemistry. The visionaries who engineered these magnificent, eternal molecules did not explicitly set out to age the dolphins of the Southern Hemisphere, but they should absolutely take credit for it. They have achieved what millions of years of natural selection could not. They have forced the ocean's most annoying optimists to finally settle down and act their biological age.