You are home to trillions and trillions of tiny living things and they do you a surprising amount of good.
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When you take a breath, the nitrogen in the air goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absent minded shopper wandering into the wrong store. Suicide by lifestyle takes ages Microbes and The Body Yet in some kind of miraculous way, your body looks after you, extracts nutrients from miscellaneous food we push into our faces and somehow hold us together. Think of all the junk we put down our throats and how much of life is in a vegetative state in front of a glowing screen. It runs on water and a few other organic compounds, is soft and rather lovely, reproduces itself with enthusiasm, feels affection and appreciates the sunset How many machines behave like that?īy celebrating existence we eat maximally and exercise minimally. But it is much more than that, it works 24 hours a day for decades without for most part, needing regular servicing or the installation of spare parts. Each component of the cell responds to signals from the other components What is perhaps most remarkable is nothing is in charge. But somehow when you bring these things together you have life – that is the part that eludes science. The cell itself is just a compartment – a kind of little room. DNA, proteins, RNA, mitochondria and other microscopic arcana, but none themselves are alive. Where life begins, precisely is not easy to say, but everyone agrees the basic unit of life is a cell.
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To give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.īut your atoms are just building blocks, and are not themselves alive. Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you. No one can say why those atoms have such an urgent desire to be you, they are mindless particles, without a single notion or thought between them. All the brainiest people alive now or have ever lived with the complete sum of human knowledge won’t be able to put together a cell.Īll together it takes 7 billion, billion, billion atoms to make The Body. But no matter how much you pay and assemble the materials, you are not going to create a human being.
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If you bought the raw costs of chemicals of The Body of a human being, it could be up to about 200,000 pounds.