Ten Thousand Acts of Repair

In 1974, Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl made a discovery that should have been terrifying: DNA — the very code that makes you you — is unstable. Every single day, each cell in your body sustains between 10,000 and 100,000 damage events. Chemical bonds break. Strands fray. Errors accumulate. The finding raised an urgent question: how are we alive at all?…