The Body by Bill Bryson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Bill Bryson
- Publish Date: October 15, 2019
- Language: English
- Genre: Science & Scientists Humor
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 55 MB
- Pages: 464
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 0385539304
HOW TO BUILD A HUMAN
How like a god!
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
LONG AGO, WHEN I was a junior high school student in Iowa, I
remember being taught by a biology teacher that all the chemicals
that make up a human body could be bought in a hardware store for
$5.00 or something like that. I don’t recall the actual sum. It might
have been $2.97 or $13.50, but it was certainly very little even in
1960s money, and I remember being astounded at the thought that
you could make a slouched and pimply thing such as me for
practically nothing.
It was such a spectacularly humbling revelation that it has stayed
with me all these years. The question is, was it true? Are we really
worth so little?
Many authorities (for which possibly read “science majors who
don’t have a date on a Friday”) have tried at various times, mostly for
purposes of amusement, to compute how much it would cost in
materials to build a human. Perhaps the most respectable and
comprehensive attempt of recent years was done by Britain’s Royal
Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science
Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the
elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
(Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and
was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)
Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are
needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for
99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit
unexpected. Who would have thought that we would be incomplete
without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin,
and copper? Our requirements for some of these, it must be said, are
surpassingly modest and are measured in parts per million or even
parts per billion. We need, for instance, just 20 atoms of cobalt and
30 of chromium for every 999,999,999½ atoms of everything else.
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 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.
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