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Scientists: Eye Lens Can Reveal Birth Year

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By THOMAS H. MAUGH II, Los Angeles Times

Published: February 23, 2008

Radioactive carbon-14 trapped in the lens of the eye permits researchers to accurately date the year of a person's birth, according to Danish scientists.

The lens contains proteins called "lens crystallines" that are transparent, allowing light to pass through to the retina. These proteins are produced during the first year of life and are unchanged afterward, providing a unique record of the time of birth.

The only other bodily proteins that remain unchanged are those in the enamel of teeth, but they are formed over a five- to six-year period and are less useful in dating.

Forensic medicine specialist Niels Lynnerup of the University of Copenhagen and physicist Henrik Kjaeldsen of Aarhus University in Denmark reported Tuesday in the online journal PLoS ONE that measuring the amount of carbon-14 in the lenses of 13 corpses using a large nuclear particle accelerator provided the year of birth.

The primary restrictions on the technology are that the person has to have been born after 1950, the lens must be removed within three days after death before it decays too much and the individual cannot have subsisted primarily on seafood, which raises the readings.

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