Biological ageing clocks in middle/late life: How sleep disparities reflect systemic inequities in healthcare access and data colonialism
Original framing: “Publisher Correction: Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life” — Nature
The voices most affected by sleep disparities—such as **night-shift workers** (disproportionately women and racial minorities), **chronically ill patients**, or **homeless individuals**—are absent from this research. For example, studies on *shift-work disorder* show that Black women in healthcare face higher rates of sleep deprivation due to systemic barriers in childcare and workplace discrimination, yet these realities are omitted. The study’s correction does not engage with these communities, instead centering the experiences of those who already have access to sleep-tracking technologies—a classic example of **data privilege**.
This study’s biological ageing clocks are not a neutral scientific breakthrough but a **reinscription of colonial power dynamics** in the guise of precision medicine.
The omission of Indigenous knowledge, historical parallels to eugenics, and marginalized voices reveals a **systemic erasure** where sleep—once a culturally sacred and adaptive practice—is reduced to a commodity for extraction. The *Trickster* here is Hermes, exposing how the correction itself is a smokescreen: it acknowledges a technical error while leaving intact the **data colonialism** that enables sleep-tracking firms to profit from the health disparities they claim to measure. Solutions must center **decolonial data sovereignty**, **worker-led sleep justice**, and **cross-cultural epistemologies**, as seen in Māori governance models or African polyphasic sleep traditions. The path forward lies not in refining flawed metrics but in **reimagining sleep as a site of resistance**—where Indigenous stewardship, labor organizing, and open-source technology converge to reclaim this fundamental human experience from corporate and institutional control.