The Boston Globe

Globe 100

Innovators | Medicine

Biologist tests the boundaries of fertility science

Jonathan Tilly, OvaScience

Jonathan Tilly may go down in history as the scientist who rewrote conventional wisdom about a woman’s biological clock.

Tilly, a Harvard Medical School researcher, was initially investigating why reproductive cells sometimes die in the ovaries. Along the way, the founder of OvaScience Inc. discovered that stem cells in ovarian tissue could form new eggs or be used to rejuvenate a woman’s existing eggs — a finding that could increase the chances of older women having babies.

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