Is there a way to determine the EXACT age of person??

Question

I know that people have birth certificates and records...but what if such records simply did not exist for a person, and they just appeared oneday?? I know that doctors can determine a general age of a person...(between 15 and 18 years old) but is there a procedure to find exact age. Like 18 years old...or 13

I'm curious because of the Chinese olympic scandal. Since the girls records say they are 16 is it at all possible to determine if that is false?

Answer 1

Yes, you'll be interested to hear that there is one known way at least and it was a recent discovery by Danish scientists.  However, it's not really appropriate for use on living patients as it requires the removal of the lens as far as I can see.  :o(

Basically the test is able to define your birth year based on the levels of Carbon-14 isotope in the lens of your eye.  This is only possible because nuclear testing, banned since 1963, raised the levels of C14 in the atmosphere, which in turn raised the levels in developing organisms.

Because the level in the organism, tested in their lens, is very well correlated to the level in the atmosphere at the time of birth and because this level has been clearly measured decreasing since 1963, it is possible to tell in young people at least.  I'm not totally clear if it's possible to use this previous to 1963 but all that would take is if levels were being recorded then too.

It will also only be useful for a limited amount of time, estimated at about a century into the future, as levels return to normal.  That is, without any further massive alterations anyway.

Here's a link to a news article about it.  I couldn't find the paper I read before on it. http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/a...

Edit: sci219 raises an interesting idea and there is actually a 2002 Japanese study that determined this as a method for estimating the age of people for forensic science. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez...

This was an improvement on the bone and teeth techniques http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/0020... but I don't know if it's more or less acurate than the C14 method.  I guess I can't see why it couldn't be used on a living person though.

Answer 2

You determine age by bone thickness, but that starts to fail as the person gets older (difficult to distinguish). I would say look at the degradation of telomeres on each of the chromosomes. Telomeres shorten with age of cell. So you can easily make a linear equation that encompasses a group of length standards along with age. Then maybe you can calculate the telomere length of the individual and throw it inot the equation and get an age.

This idea might work.

good luck.

Answer 3

sorry, I think some one CH---is right.