Your DNA is changing all the time. Here’s why
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Short Rivers, I'm going to take us back to high school biology, the genetics chapter. You may have learned that the human body is made up of trillions of cells, and inside those cells are DNA molecules, those strands that contain the genetic code that makes you, you. But here's something that may surprise you and you may not have learned in school. that DNA is not the same for every cell. And that's because DNA is constantly changing. There's actually trillions of mutations happening in your cells every day. This is Roxanne Comsey. She's a science journalist and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
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.
By the way, scientists have known for decades that our genes mutate. It's just that in the last decade, DNA sequencing has gotten so much more powerful and precise that scientists can now read the genetic code of individual cells.
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.
And it turns out there is a lot of genetic diversity going on inside us. So much so that Roxanne wrote an entire book about it called Genetics. Beyond inheritance, our ever-mutating cells and a new understanding of health.
People hear the word mutation and they immediately think about something negative. But there's also good things that can happen with mutation.
So today on the show, genetic mutations like you've never seen them before. Out of the trillions of mutations happening inside us every day, yes, trillions, which ones matter? What do scientists know about them?
What surprising facts about DNA mutations are discussed?
And if our DNA is always changing, then who are we really? I'm Emily Kwong. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Roxanne, so usually when we talk about genetic mutations, it's because something extraordinary arises from it, like the formation of an entire species eventually or an inherited disorder. But in your book, you say mutations are ordinary. They're as common as salt. They are happening all the time. What kinds of mutations are happening all the time?
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
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