By Krysta Coyle

DNA REPLICATION: NOT YOUR OFFICE PHOTOCOPIER

(Art by Armin Mortazavi) If the letters in the human genome, your DNA code, were a book, it would take a person typing 60 words per minute, 8 hours a day, around 50 years to copy the 3 billion base pairs. This incredible task of replicating all the genetic material in a cell must be accurate, must be copied only once, and must be complete at a specific point in time. The smallest mistakes can be disastrous. Sounds impossible? Not so fast – cells in your body are dividing as you read, and here’s the incredible part: copies of your…