Posts Tagged ‘human body’
“The body is our general medium for having a world”*…
The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas. The reason we are not light and bouncy like a balloon is that the oxygen is mostly bound up with hydrogen (which accounts for another 10 percent of you) to make water — and water, as you will know if you have ever tried to move a wading pool or just walked around in really wet clothes, is surprisingly heavy. It is a little ironic that two of the lightest things in nature, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined form one of the heaviest, but that’s nature for you. Oxygen and hydrogen are also two of the cheaper elements within you. All of your oxygen will set you back just $14 and your hydrogen a little over $26 (assuming you are about the size of Benedict Cumberbatch). Your nitrogen (2.6 percent of you) is a better value still at just forty cents for a body’s worth. But after that it gets pretty expensive.
You need about thirty pounds of carbon, and that will cost you $69,550, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. (They were using only the most purified forms of everything. The RSC would not make a human with cheap stuff.) Calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, though needed in much smaller amounts, would between them set you back a further $73,800. Most of the rest is even more expensive per unit of volume, but fortunately only needed in microscopic amounts.
Thorium costs over $3,000 per gram but constitutes just 0.0000001 percent of you, so you can buy a body’s worth for thirty-three cents. All the tin you require can be yours for six cents, while zirconium and niobium will cost you just three cents apiece. The 0.000000007 percent of you that is samarium isn’t apparently worth charging for at all. It’s logged in the RSC accounts as costing $0.00.
Of the fifty-nine elements found within us, twenty-four are traditionally known as essential elements, because we really cannot do without them. The rest are something of a mixed bag. Some are clearly beneficial, some may be beneficial but we are not sure in what ways yet, others are neither harmful nor beneficial but are just along for the ride as it were, and a few are just bad news altogether. Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic. We have it in us not because our body craves it but because it gets into plants from the soil and then into us when we eat the plants. If you are from North America, you probably ingest about eighty micrograms of cadmium a day, and no part of it does you any good at all.
A surprising amount of what goes on at this elemental level is still being worked out. Pluck almost any cell from your body, and it will have a million or more selenium atoms in it, yet until recently nobody had any idea what they were there for. We now know that selenium makes two vital enzymes, deficiency in which has been linked to hypertension, arthritis, anemia, some cancers, and even, possibly, reduced sperm counts. So, clearly it is a good idea to get some selenium inside you (it is found particularly in nuts, whole wheat bread, and fish), but at the same time if you take in too much you can irremediably poison your liver. As with so much in life, getting the balances right is a delicate business.
Altogether, according to the RSC, the full cost of building a new human being, using the obliging Benedict Cumberbatch as a template, would be a very precise $151,578.46. … That said, in 2012 Nova, the long-running science program on PBS, did an exactly equivalent analysis for an episode called ‘Hunting the Elements’ and came up with a figure of $168 for the value of the fundamental components within the human body…
An excerpt from Bill Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants, via the ever-illuminating Delanceyplace.com: “How much, in materials, would it cost to build a human body?“
* Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
###
As we take our vitamins, we might we might send dynamically-evolved birthday greetings to Stephen Jay Gould; he was born on this date in 1941. One of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science in his generation (e.g., Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb), Gould was a highly-respected academic paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. With Niles Eldridge, he developed the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” an explanation of evolution that suggests (in contrast with the gradualism that was prevalent until then) that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which are interrupted– “punctuated”– by rare instances of branching evolution (c.f., the Burgess Shale).
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline… We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul”*…
DID YOU KNOW:
• Bill Gates is actually worth $1,956
• Canadian pop star Justin Bieber has five times fewer cells in his brain than in his liver
• Top tennis player Serena Williams has 24.5 trillion red blood cells powering her body
• Internet and social media pioneer Mark Zuckerberg’s body contains 800MB of data
• President Barack Obama’s head rules his heart; his brain weighs 1.4kg, his heart just 0.4kgWelcome to The Making of Me and You, a unique, new digital interactive from BBC Earth that details extraordinary personalised facts.
Just input your date of birth, sex at birth, height and weight, and choose the metric or imperial units that make most sense to you.
And instantly find out:
• The chemical ingredients that make up you, and what your body is worth
• How many atoms you are made of, and what can be made with them
• How many fat, blood, skin and brain cells you have
• How much genetic data is inside you
• How many other microbes live on your body with you
• The size and weight of your internal organs
• How much wee, poo, sperm or eggs you have produced so far
• How many times you have blinked, breathed, yawned and farted
• And so much more
Try it at: “The Making of You and Me.”
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
###
As we take our measures, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent 4,736,866 to Harvard College for “a transgenic non-human mammal whose germ cells and somatic cells contain a recombinant activated oncogene sequence introduced into said mammal…”– the first U.S. patent issued on a mammalian life form. The Oncomouse (as it was known, a mouse altered to be highly susceptible to breast cancer) was called the product of the year by a major financial magazine.
Although the mouse was genetically modified following a process designed by Philip Leder and Timothy A Stewart of Harvard, and the patent was owned by Harvard Medical School, it was developed with funding from DuPont, which scored a commercialization arrangement that entitled DuPont to exclusive license of the patent. Until the patent was ruled expired in 2005, DuPont claimed patent protection on any anticancer product derived from the mice.
The first patent for a life form was issued seven years earlier for a genetically engineered bacterium.
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself”*…
Did you ever wonder where you came from? That is the stuff that’s inside your body like your bones, organs, muscles…etc. All of these things are made of various molecules and atoms. But where did these little ingredients come from? And how were they made?…
Find the answer at “How much of the human body is made up of stardust?”
* Carl Sagan
###
As we hum along with Hoagy Carmichael, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that the first American edition of Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita was released. Finished in 1953, Nabakov was turned down by publishers ranging from Simon & Schuster to New Directions, all concerned about its subject matter. Nabakov turned to Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press, and published in France in 1955. Though it received almost no critical attention on release, Graham Greene called in “one of the three best novels of 1955” in a year-end wrap-up published in the Sunday Times— provoking a response in the Sunday Express that the novel was one “one of the filthiest” ever. Surprisingly to many, the novel’s American launch elicited no official response. But it registered hugely with the reading public: it went into a third printing within days and became the first novel since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Lolita is included on Time‘s “List of the 100 Best Novels in the English language from 1923 to 2005,” and it is fourth on the Modern Library’s 1998 “List of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.”
Cover and half-title page of a presentation copy of the first American edition, inscribed by Nabokov to his wife, Vera ( “Verina verae Nab Aug. 1958 Ithaca”) and embellished with a delicately-rendered butterfly.
You must be logged in to post a comment.