But that's not the case, is it?

it?No, it's not the case at all.

And interestingly, I was just telling someone about this.

So in the book, I mention how when scientists got this new sequencing technology called single-cell sequencing technology, which has really opened up our ability to see the body as a landscape of different mutation, right? And first thing they did is they looked at the eyelid because they figured eyelid gets a lot of sunlight, sunlight causes mutation, and as some people might know, there's a, you know, these eye lifts that people get, the blepharoplasties, where they take some of their eye tissue away to make themselves look rejuvenated.

It's a cosmetic surgery.

So they took some of that discarded tissue, and they found, yes, there's an abundance of mutation happening as people go through every day of their life in the skin of their eyelid.

But what's even more interesting is that then they looked at the esophagus, and the esophagus had even more mutation.

Tell me about that.

What happened there?

Yeah, so this is a story of Astraea.

Her parents basically, she was their third child.

This happened about 13 years ago, and, um, her mother when she was pregnant, they said, "We have to monitor you pretty closely towards this end of this pregnancy.

We're not sure this baby's heart is functioning properly." And so she had an emergency C-section towards the end of her pregnancy, and when Astraea was born, um, her parents didn't even see her immediately.

She was whisked away to the neonatal intensive care unit, and there she had a heart attack.

Um, doctors thought she had something called long QT syndrome, which was at the time thought to be an inherited disorder only.

What are some of the more interesting ways scientists are trying to correct these genetic mutations that happen throughout our lives?

Hmm.

But these kids were doing fine, and the doctors in New York couldn't understand it.

Then they decided to look at the DNA of these boys more closely, and what they found out is that in addition to having the inherited disorder, so the mutation that would've caused their immune systems to malfunction, they actually had second corrective mutations that were actually allowing their imm- immune systems to function well.

And this isn't just a fluke.

That could be a really good thing." [laughs]

Yeah, but, like, put that aside.

There are people who are, are looking at factors that contribute to longevity, and how is, how is mutation playing a role in that? So interestingly, centenarians, so people who live 100 years or more, have been found to have, like, certain variants of the SIRT6 gene, which is involved in DNA repair.

So there's companies now looking at all this data and actually trying to kind of explore the idea of slowing our mutation down.