Cancer Research UK on The Rest Is Science

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Our bodies are incredible machines, whirring away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive. In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back. To the moon and back! That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase. By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate and that collection of errors can lead to cancer. But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, they've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.