SCIENCE BRIEFING
Times Staff and Wire Reports
Scientists said Thursday that they had shown the human body regenerates heart cells at a rate of about 1% a year.
The study of 50 volunteers, using a dating method that detects traces of a carbon isotope left by Cold War nuclear bomb tests, raises the prospect of artificially stimulating the renewal process someday, they reported in the journal Science.
“It would be a way to try and help the heart to some self-help rather than transplanting new cells,” Jonas Frisen of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a telephone interview.
