The Repair That Never Stops

Every day, the DNA inside each of your cells absorbs roughly 10,000 damaging events — radiation, chemical stress, errors in copying. Left unchecked, this damage would unravel you from the inside out. But it doesn't. Inside every nucleus, a fleet of molecular repair enzymes works around the clock. In 2015, chemists Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize for mapping precisely how these systems operate — cutting out corrupted sequences, rebuilding them from scratch, stitching the strand back together.…