Podcast recap: Inigo Martincorena on somatic evolution in healthy tissue

Every cell in the body picks up changes to its DNA over a lifetime. For most of the history of cancer genomics, researchers could only read those changes once a tumor had formed, because mutations in normal tissue sit at frequencies too low for older sequencing methods to detect. That left basic questions unanswered, such as how many mutations a healthy cell carries by middle age, which of them give a cell a growth advantage, and what those expanding clones mean for cancer, aging and chronic disease.