Roxanne Khamsi

a spontaneous event can have really profound impacts on our health.

So we know that things like sunlight obviously cause our skin cells to mutate.

That's what's linked to skin cancer, for example.

If you have good quality sleep, if you sleep well, that is actually linked to fewer mutant cells.

But what I found really striking is that we now have the ability to dissect our mutations so much that scientists can actually look at the signature of your mutation, so where they fall in the genome.

And actually tell you if you have been smoking tobacco or chewing tobacco.

Like that's how refined a picture we're getting of how our behaviors affect ourselves.

So in the past, people might have said, oh, don't smoke.

It gives you cancer.

Now we're actually saying, okay, don't chew tobacco or don't smoke tobacco because these are the actual kinds of mutations you're going to get that may then precipitate something down the road.

So yeah, behaviors cause cancer.

And then sometimes it's just, you know, chance.

Say more about that chance.

Well, what I think is really interesting is that when embryos are dividing cells, so like, you know, we all start with as one cell for the first 24 hours of our life, and then we're two cells.

And by day five, we're 100 cells with this hollow center.

That's one of the most active places of cell division in the course of our lives is this embryonic development.

And I spoke with this family that 13 years ago, their youngest daughter was born and like immediately taken to the ICU, the neonatal ICU.

And they were trying desperately to figure out what was going on with her.

And what they thought she had was this condition called long QT syndrome.

But then they kind of looked and her parents didn't have it, which was strange because this was thought to be an inherited disorder.