So today was the day. The complete genetic code of an anonymous Irish person was sequenced for the first time..today. What does this mean? It was found that this particular person possessed 400,000 novel mutations of single DNA bases. Almost 8,000 of these appeared to be inherited by it's ancestors along with genes known to influence disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, liver disease and cancers.
This scares me. According to this logic, cancer is an evolutionary genetic typo, like a transcription "whoops!...any tipex?". These diseases are things that we need to put up with, not through any fault of our own, but becuase our parents and their parent and their parents etc. got it on. Not to say that we can just sail through life eating and drinking and smoking whatever we want, external factors do help it along. But other things such as smoking and X-rays also cause mutations in our genetic sequence. How do we escape?
