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Like other people have posted above, it stills seems amazing to me that something such as one simple mistake in pairing up adenine to thymine, or cytosine to guanine, can have such awful effects: sickle cell amenia, for example, which we looked at in class.  I wonder how common these mistakes are in the body.  I remember learning in ap biology that there are certain mechanisms that could possible correct for these errors (dna polymerases?).  what makes some errors able to be corrected, but makes others unable to be corrected ?  Could these simple mistakes in matching up nucleotides be the reason for other diseases that we are still learning how to cure?