If scientists can’t count all the cells in a human body, how can they estimate it? The mean weight of a cell is 1 nanogram. Clearly, this is a subject ripe for research. And practically none of scientists who offered those numbers provided an explanation for how they came up with them. But those estimates sprawled over a huge range, from 5 billion to 200 million trillion cells. They looked back over scientific journals and books from the past couple centuries and found many estimates. The authors–a team of scientists from Italy, Greece, and Spain–admit that they’re hardly the first people to tackle this question. Plus, there would be certain logistical problems you’d encounter along the way to counting all the cells in your body–for example, chopping your own body up into tiny patches for microscopic viewing.įor now, the best we can hope for is a study published recenty in Annals of Human Biology, entitled, with admirable clarity, “An Estimation of the Number of Cells in the Human Body.” Even if you could count ten cells each second, it would take you tens of thousands of years to finish counting. Some types of cells are easy to spot, while others–such as tangled neurons–weave themselves up into obscurity. And while it’s easy enough to look through a microscope and count off certain types of cells, this method isn’t practical either. Unfortunately, your cells can’t fill out census forms, so they can’t tell you themselves. A simple question deserves a simple answer.
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