Qualla: Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing

Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPI AGE / K. Link, CC BY-SA 4.0. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans lives, on average, about two weeks. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster gets roughly 50 days. The African turquoise killifish — the shortest-lived vertebrate ever kept in a laboratory — burns through its entire existence in four to six months. On the western edge of Cologne, on the campus of the city's university hospital, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing work with all four of these organisms because their lives are short enough to watch from end to end. The hope is that what they learn from a worm or a fish will eventually help a human being get older without falling apart. That is the entire point of the building.

Image: MPI AGE / K. Link | CC BY-SA 4.0

Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing: A Young Institute for an Old Question

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPI AGE / K. Link, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing was founded in 2008, making it one of the youngest of the more than 80 institutes that operate under the Max Planck Society. The foundation stone of its permanent research building was laid in 2010, and the doors opened in 2013. Thre...

Image: MPI AGE / K. Link | CC BY-SA 4.0

Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing: Why Worms and Yeast

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPI AGE / K. Link, CC BY-SA 4.0. Studying aging in humans is almost impossibly slow. A scientist who started a longitudinal study on the day they were born would still be running it on the day they died, and even then would have observed only one life. So the institute relies on model organisms: the mouse Mus mu...

Image: MPI AGE / K. Link | CC BY-SA 4.0

Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing: A Cluster, Not an Island

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPI AGE / D. Hummel, CC BY-SA 4.0. The MPI for Biology of Ageing does not stand alone. It is the central anchor of a regional Life Science Cluster that links it to the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research next door, the Cluster of Excellence CECAD at the University of Cologne, and partner institutes in Bon...

Image: MPI AGE / D. Hummel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing: What Comes Back to Patients

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MPI AGE / K. Link, CC BY-SA 4.0. All this attention to flies and worms eventually has to circle back to people, and it does. The institute studies tissue samples from patients seen in the adjacent hospital, and it conducts research with long-lived families — the great-great-grandchildren of people who somehow re...

Image: MPI AGE / K. Link | CC BY-SA 4.0