system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could we measure the age of an organism by looking at its DNA?

The ends of DNA get shaved off every time they’re copied, as far as i remember. So could we measure the age of an organism by looking at its DNA? For cases where we don’t have the birthday.
gpt
Those are teleomeres. But to do what you’re talking about would require having an sample of the DNA sequence at the literal moment of conception / first cellular division of the organism in question. As well as a known rate of teleomere loss.

The first is essentially impossible. The second is likely to vary for every organism and also essentially impossible to determine.