Name: How long would you survive with no DNA?
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 16 s
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"If someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?"

Well, they would instantly be about a third of a pound lighter.

Unfortunately, the consequences wouldn't stop there.

If your DNA disappeared, it's possible you'd feel something—

like a tiny, uniform shockwave as every cell contracted slightly, or as your muscles adjusted to the slightly different load.

After that, you'd probably feel pretty normal for a while.

so we can't say for sure what the precise sequence of medical consequences would be.

But mushroom poisoning, chemotherapy, and radiation poisoning can give us a rough idea.

Amanita bisporigera is a species of mushroom found in eastern North America,

known by the common name Destroying Angel.

Destroying Angel is a small, white, innocuous-looking mushroom.

If you're like me, you were told to never eat mushrooms you found in the woods.

If you eat a Destroying Angel, for the rest of the day you'll feel fine.

Later that night, or the next morning, you'll suffer from vomiting, abdominal pain, and severe diarrhea.

Then you'll start to feel better, at which point the damage is probably irreversible.

Amanita mushrooms contain amatoxin, which interferes with an enzyme used to read DNA,

interrupting the process by which cells follow DNA's instructions

and causing irreversible damage to whatever cells it collects in.

Since most of your body is made of cells, this is bad for you.

Death is generally caused by liver or kidney failure, since those are the first sensitive organs in which the toxin accumulates.

Sometimes intensive care and a liver transplant can be enough to save a patient.

The really frightening thing about Amanita poisoning is the "walking ghost" phase—

the period where you seem to be getting better,

but your cells continue to accumulate irreversible and lethal damage.

and we'd likely see something like it in someone who lost their DNA.

The picture is even more vividly illustrated by two other examples of DNA damage—chemotherapy and radiation.

Doxorubicin, one of the most common and potent chemotherapy drugs,

interrupts cell division by linking and tangling random sections of DNA together.

The reason doxorubicin selectively kills cancer cells is that cancer cells are dividing all the time,

whereas most normal cells only divide occasionally.

Some human cells do divide nearly constantly,

like those found in hair follicles, bone marrow (which produces blood, including white blood cells), and stomach lining.

Chemotherapy messes with the DNA of such constantly dividing cells and hampers cell division,

causing hair loss, vulnerability to infections, and most immediately, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

Gamma radiation also harms you by damaging your DNA.

And because your whole body can be exposed to radiation at once,

it's probably the kind of real-life injury that most resembles Nina's scenario of losing all your DNA.

Radiation poisoning also has a walking ghost phase, where the body is still working

but no new proteins can be synthesized and the immune system is collapsing.

In cases of severe radiation poisoning, immune system collapse is often the primary cause of death.

Without a supply of white blood cells, the body can't fight off infections,

and ordinary bacteria in the body run wild.

In short, losing your DNA would most likely result in abdominal pain, nausea, dizziness,

rapid immune system collapse, and death within days or hours,

from either rapid systemic infection or system-wide organ failure.

On the other hand, there would be at least one silver lining.

If we ever end up in a dystopian future where an Orwellian, Gattaca-style police state collects our genetic information and uses it to track and control us, you'd be invisible.