The Genome's Second Chance

In 2015, chemist Tomas Lindahl received the Nobel Prize for a discovery that stunned the scientific community: your body's DNA is constantly breaking down — and constantly being rebuilt. Every single day, each of your 37 trillion cells sustains thousands of molecular injuries. Radiation, oxidation, copying errors — the genome is under relentless assault. But Lindahl found something remarkable. Buried inside each cell is a sophisticated repair system — proteins that patrol the DNA strand like careful editors, searching for damage, cutting out the broken sections, and restoring the sequence to its original design.…