How do cells make copies of themselves?
The Copy Trick
How do cells make copies of themselves?
Inside you, right now, something quietly heroic is happening. Cells — the tiny living bricks that build all of you — are making copies of themselves. One becomes two, two become four, and that's how a scraped knee heals and a baby grows. But copying a whole living thing is no small trick. Let's watch one cell pull it off.
Before a cell can split, it has to copy its instruction book. That book is called DNA — a long, twisty ladder of chemical letters that spells out how to build and run the whole cell. Think of it as the recipe collection for everything the cell does. You can't hand half a recipe book to a new kitchen, so first, the whole thing must be duplicated.
