Roxanne Khamsi

And that's if you smoke a cigarette, you have mutations that happen in your body.

But now scientists can see, thanks to these technological advancements,

that smoking a cigarette causes different mutations from, let's say, chewing tobacco.

And I think what this points to is we're going to now be able to dissect how behaviors interact with our DNA at a whole new level.

And also, so when we see a mutation has corrected an inherited disorder, we can go back and say, hey, can we develop a drug based on that mutation that can help other people that didn't spontaneously correct in that way?

And we're finding that that actually is

the path that some researchers are taking with liver disease already.

I definitely think that writing this book has changed how I think about genetic disease.

So when I started my career...

When people talked about patients with genetic disorders, there was a lot of othering, right?

Like they have a mutation.

I don't have a mutation.

I'm safe.

I'm okay.

It felt like people try to create space between those people with genetic disease and those people without.

And what I've really come to understand is that we are all mutants, right?

There's no othering.

We all have a lot of spontaneity in our DNA and who knows what kind of mutations we pick up.

So I think that's kind of made me see a more universal process in our DNA.

I think that's really what's changed in my perspective, if that makes sense.