Arlotta Paola, Macklis Jeffrey D
MGH-HMS Center for Nervous System Repair, Department of Neurosurgery, Program in Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, Massachusettes General Hospital, Boston, Massachusettes 02114, USA.
Cell. 2005 Jul 15;122(1):4-6. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2005.06.037.
Defining the life span of specific human cell populations is limited by our inability to mark the exact time when cells are born in a way that can be detected over many years. In this issue of Cell, Spalding et al. (2005) describe a clever strategy for retrospectively birth dating human cells in vivo, based on their incorporation of 14C during a peak in atmospheric levels of this isotope resulting from above-ground nuclear arms testing in the 1950s.