A capstone essay closing our series on the Mosaic Body. The new science of somatic mutation, clonal expansion, and mosaic aging is more than an interesting development in molecular biology….
Genetic mosaicism is the condition of having different DNA in different cells of the same body. Every adult has it. A clear guide to mosaicism, chimerism, microchimerism, and the surprising…
Germline mutations are inherited from your parents and present in every cell. Somatic mutations arise during life and live in only some cells. The distinction shapes how cancer is treated,…
Somatic mutations are DNA changes that happen in your body’s cells throughout life, not at conception. A plain-English guide to what they are, how they arise, why most of them…
An inaugural entry in HD Reads. Roxanne Khamsi’s Beyond Inheritance is the most important popular biology book of 2026 to date, and the foundation text for a way of seeing…
By age seventy, somewhere between ten and twenty percent of people carry a population of mutated blood stem cells that quietly double their risk of heart disease. The condition has…
A growing body of work argues that the body does not age all at once. It ages in tiles. The pace at which your fastest-aging organ breaks down, not the…
A landmark Nature study finds that Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is driven in part by acquired somatic mutations that disable the immune system’s brakes. A new model of autoimmune disease is taking…
A new picture of the human body is emerging from the world’s genome sequencers, and it is not the one most of us were taught. We are not single, settled…
About ten thousand years ago, a group of Neolithic farmers in the Balsas River Basin of Mexico began writing a genome. They did not know it. The crop they produced,…
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