The Body That Refuses to Give Up

Every day, without your awareness, something remarkable is happening inside every cell of your body. Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Tomas Lindahl — whose research earned him the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — showed that each human cell sustains somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 individual DNA lesions every single day: breaks, deletions, chemical corruptions from sunlight, oxygen, and ordinary metabolism.

That should be catastrophic. But it isn't. Your body comes equipped with an astonishing array of repair mechanisms. Specialized proteins constantly patrol your DNA, locate damage, snip out the broken strand, and rebuild it — letter by letter — back to its original design.

Lindahl's foundational insight was that DNA is inherently unstable. Life doesn't endure because our genetic code is indestructible. Life endures because the body has become expert at repair.

I can't think about that without thinking about forgiveness.