Roxanne Khamsi

We're just constantly in flux, partly because there's just wear and tear, like genes will get turned on and sometimes things will break and then enzymes will come in and try to fix it, but they won't always do the best job fixing it.

So we are kind of a landscape of genetic diversity, each of us, just by nature of all the DNA changes, all those errors that pile up over the course of our lives.

There's been this possibility to kind of do a census of the cells in a body and figure out which ones have which mutations that the other cells don't have.

So then here we are grasping this diversity, this genetic diversity that exists inside us.

People hear the word mutation and they immediately think about something negative.

But there's also good things that can happen with mutation.

So yeah, I guess I could have called this book like Everyday Mutations.

I mean, you and I are mutating as we're having this conversation.

People listening to this are mutating as they're listening.

It's something kind of ongoing.

It's kind of the background noise, if you will, of our lives.

Because the cells are copying and just making errors all the time.

Yeah, there's cell turnover all the time.

Like our skin cells, you wouldn't believe how many skin cells we shed.

Our blood is turning over constantly.

And it has implications for our health, even these smaller scale mutations, because there's a lot of mutation happening and a lot of it doesn't matter in our cells.

But every once in a while, there is something that happens and it's not going to cause a new species.

It might be an evolutionary dead end because we're not going to pass it on to the next generation.

But for the vast majority of the mutations in our bodies, what matters is where it falls in the genome.

And if it falls in a place that matters and that that cell reproduces or replicates itself, that's when you get into a situation where