Ten Thousand Daily Repairs

Right now, without your awareness or effort, your body is repairing itself at a molecular level. Scientists estimate that each of your cells sustains between 10,000 and 100,000 DNA lesions every single day — damage caused by sunlight, oxidative stress, and the ordinary act of being alive. In 2015, chemists Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the body's elaborate, built-in repair systems that find these breaks in the genetic code and fix them — constantly, quietly, without fanfare.…