Our Unstable Genome

Everyone has genetic flaws

 

Most HSPers know that they have a genetic flaw but did you know that almost everyone has roughly 70 spontaneous, ‘single letter typos’ in their genetic coding?  Researchers are exploring genomic instability and with new technology seeing more than ever before.

 

How the quest to understand humanity’s shifting blueprint may better arm us to fight cancer and prevent birth defects

 

By Ian Demsky

 

A famous proverb holds that Persian carpets are perfectly imperfect, precisely imprecise. Intentional flaws in the weave symbolize a belief that true perfection is a quality reserved solely for the divine. Likewise, we humans are all imperfect copies of our ideal selves. For starters, within the billions of characters of DNA code we inherit from our parents, we each have roughly 70 spontaneous, single-letter typos.

 

“There are mistakes all over our DNA,” says Sally A. Camper, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan Medical School. “The average person has dozens of tiny additions, deletions and changes in their genome ranging from those single base pairs up to several hundred kilobases — several hundred thousand base pairs.”

 

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