Benjamin Thompson
speaker
746 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Sep
Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
This is an audio long read from Nature.
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In this episode, could mending damaged DNA prolong life?
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Written by Elizabeth Quill and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.
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Your DNA is under constant assault.
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Ultraviolet light, environmental toxins, reactive molecules made during run of the mill metabolism, and many other disruptors mark with the instructions that keep life humming along.
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Thankfully, repair crews are at the ready.
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A typical cell can acquire up to a whopping one hundred thousand lesions each day.
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The vast, vast majority are repaired, says Morton Skyby Knuson, a translational geoscientist at the University of Copenhagen.
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Quote We have very, very efficient repair, end quote.
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That's a good thing for a couple of reasons.
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First, unrepaired or poorly repaired damage can introduce mutations, which can contribute to cancer.
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And second, DNA damage seems to be one of the main drivers of aging.
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Researchers are amassing evidence that this type of damage underlies many of the hallmarks of aging, including chronic inflammation, metabolic malfunctions, and protein folding problems.
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Such damage triggers cellular alarm bells that can promote inflammation, force cells into an undead state known as senescence and even kill them.
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These responses help the body to grow and thrive, but they become more problematic as we age.
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The accumulation of beleaguered cells over time is associated with many age related conditions, including cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and Alzheimer's.
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That raises a question.
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If DNA damage is at the root of aging, can boosting DNA repair slow the process, keeping people healthy for longer?
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For the first time, this is starting to look like a promising approach, say researchers who study DNA repair.
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Their new optimism comes from studying relatively long lived species, such as bowhead whales and naked mole rats, and looking at the genetics of human centenarians.
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Showing 1–20 of 746 · page 1 of 38
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