Senescent cells first described in 1881

In his 1881 essay ‘The Duration of Life’, evolutionary biologist A. Weismann made an assertion considered radical in his day. “Death takes place because a worn-out tissue cannot forever renew itself, and because a capacity for increase by means of cell division is not ever-lasting but finite” (REF. 1 ). Weismann’s far-reaching idea — that an inherent limit to cell division contributed to ageing — lay dormant for more than 80 years until L. Hayflick’s work in 1961 demonstrated that mammalian cells do indeed have a finite capacity for cell division, which is a concept now referred to as the ‘Hayflick Limit’