Dan Samorodnitsky in Quanta:
When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong?
Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation or certain chemicals, damages DNA, the cell needs to respond at breakneck speed. Ideally it either repairs the damage to its genomic information repository, or else sacrifices itself through a controlled cell death process. If it doesn’t move fast enough, it risks the more dangerous outcome of death by necrosis — an explosive, uncontrolled death that damages its neighbors — or passing mutated DNA to its descendants, which could develop into cancer.
More here.
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