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IT STARTS WITH a single cell. The first cell splits to bee two and the two bee fourand so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion(10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready t forth as a human being.1And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from themoment of ception to your last breath.
You have s from your cells. They know far more about you than you do. Eaecarries a copy of the plete geic code—the instruanual for your body—so itknows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body. Never in your life will youhave to remind a cell to keep an eye on its adenosiriphosphate levels or to find a place forthe extra squirt of folic acid that’s just uedly turned up. It will do that for you, andmillions more things besides.
Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits ofhuman iy. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have tominiaturize about the same number of pos as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner andfit them into a sphere just five mis across; then somehow you would have to persuade thatsphere to reproduce.
But yeast cells are as nothing pared with human cells, which are not just more variedand plicated, but vastly more fasating because of their plex iions.
Your cells are a try of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensivelyspecific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They letyou feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretd caper. Whenyou eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all thosethings you learned about in junih school biology—but they also remember to make youhungry in the first plad reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that youwon’t fet to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietlypurring. They manage every er of your being. They will jump to your defehe ins<big></big>tantyou are threatehey will uatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. Andnot on all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now tard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.
We uand a little of how cells do the things they do—how they lay down fat ormanufacture insulin age in many of the other aecessary to maintain a plicatedentity like yourself—but only a little. You have at least 200,000 different types of protein1Actually, quite a lot of cells are lost in the process of development, so the number you emerge with is reallyjust a guess. Depending on which source you sult the number vary by several orders of magnitude. Thefigure of ten thousand trillion (or quadrillion) is from Margulis and Sagan, 1986.
lab away inside you, and so far we uand what no more than about 2 pert ofthem do. (Others put the figure at more like 50 pert; it depends, apparently, on what youmean by “uand.”)Surprises at the cellular level turn up all the time. In nature, nitric oxide is a formidabletoxin and a on po of air pollution. So stists were naturally a little surprisedwhen, in the mid-1980s, they found it being produced in a curiously devoted manner inhuman cells. Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then stists began to find it all over theplace—trolling the flow of blood and the energy levels of cells, attag cers andother pathogens, regulating the sense of smell, even assisting in penile eres. It alsoexplained why nitroglye, the well-known explosive, soothes the heart pain known asangina. (It is verted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream, relaxing the muscle linings ofvessels, allowing blood to flow more freely.) In barely the space of a decade this one gassysubstance went from extraneous toxin to ubiquitous elixir.
You possess “some few hundred” different types of cell, acc to the Belgianbiochemist Christian de Duve, and they vary enormously in size and shape, from nerve cellswhose filaments stretch to several feet to tiny, disc-shaped red blood cells to the rod-shaped photocells that help to give us vision. They also e in a sumptuously wide range ofsizes—nowhere more strikingly than at the moment of ception, when a single beatingsperm fronts an egg eighty-five thousand times bigger than it (which rather puts the notionof male quest into perspective). On average, however, a human cell is about twentymis wide—that is about two huhs of a millimeter—which is too small to be seenbut roomy enough to hold thousands of plicated structures like mitodria, and millionsupon millions of molecules. In the most literal way, cells also vary in liveliness. Your skincells are all dead. It’s a somewhat galling notion to reflect that every inch of your surface isdeceased. If you are an average-sized adult you are lugging around about five pounds of deadskin, of which several billion tiny fragments are sloughed off each day. Run a finger along adusty shelf and you are drawing a pattern very largely in old skin.
Most living cells seldom last more than a month or so, but there are some notableexceptions. Liver cells survive for years, though the pos within them may berenewed every few days. Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued a hundred billionor so at birth, and that is all you are ever going to get. It has beeimated that you lose fivehundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn’t a momentto waste. The good news is that the individual pos of your brain cells are stantlyrenewed so that, as with the liver cells, no part of them is actually likely to be more than abouta month old. Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a si of any of us—not somuch as a stray molecule—that art of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at thecellular level we are all youngsters.
The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last enteredsquabbling with Isaaewton over credit for the iion of the inverse square law. Hookeachieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an aplished theoreti anda dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought himgreater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions ofMiniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665. It revealed to an entedpublic a universe of the very small that was far more diverse, crowded, and finely structuredthan anyone had ever e close to imagining.
Among the microscopic features first identified by Hooke were little chambers in plantsthat he called “cells” because they reminded him of monks’ cells. Hooke calculated that aone-inch square of cork would tain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers—the firstappearance of such a very large number anywhere in sce. Microscopes by this time hadbeen around feion or so, but what set Hooke’s apart were their teicalsupremacy. They achieved magnifications of thirty times, making them the last word ieenth-tury optical teology.
So it came as something of a shock when just a decade later Hooke and the other membersof London’s Royal Society began to receive drawings as from an uered linendraper in Holland employing magnifications of up to 275 times. The draper’s name wasAntoni van Leeuwehough he had little formal education and no background insce, he erceptive and dedicated observer and a teical genius.
To this day it is not known how he got such magnifit magnifications from simplehandheld devices, which were little more than modest wooden dowels with a tiny bubble ofglass embedded in them, far more like magnifying glasses than what most of us think of asmicroscopes, but really not much like either. Leeuwenhoek made a new instrument for everyexperiment he performed and was extremely secretive about his teiques, though he didsometimes offer tips to the British on how they might improve their resolutions.
2Over a period of fifty years—beginning, remarkably enough, when he was already pastforty—he made almost two hundred reports to the Royal Society, all written in Low Dutch,the only tongue of which he was master. Leeuwenhoek offered no interpretations, but simplythe facts of what he had found, apanied by exquisite drawings. He ses on almosteverything that could be usefully examined—bread mold, a bee’s stinger, blood cells, teeth,hair, his own saliva, excrement, and semen (these last with fretful apologies for their unsav<samp></samp>orynature)—nearly all of which had never been seen microscopically before.
After he reported finding “animalcules” in a sample of pepper water in 1676, the membersof the Royal Society spent a year with the best devices English teology could producesearg for the “little animals” before finally getting the magnificatiht. WhatLeeuwenhoek had found were protozoa. He calculated that there were 8,280,000 of these tinybeings in a single drop of water—more than the number of people in Holland. The worldteemed with life in ways and hat no one had previously suspected.
Inspired by Leeuwenhoek’s fantastidings, others began to peer into microscopes withsuch keehat they sometimes found things that weren’t in fact there. One respectedDutch observer, Nicolaus Hartsoecker, was vinced he saw “tiny preformed men” in spermcells. He ca<cite></cite>lled the little beings “homunculi” and for some time many people believed that allhumans—indeed, all creatures—were simply vastly inflated versions of tiny but pleteprecursor beings. Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms.
In one of his least successful experiments he tried to study the explosive properties ofgunpowder by a small blast at cle; he nearly blinded himself in the process.
2Leeuwenhoek was close friends with another Delft notable, the artist Jan Vermeer. In the mid-1660s, Vermeer,who previously had been a petent but not outstanding artist, suddenly developed the mastery of light andperspective for which he has been celebrated ever sihough it has never been proved, it has long beensuspected that he used a camera obscura, a device for projeg images onto a flat surface through a lens. Nosuch device was listed among Vermeers personal effects after his death, but it happens that the executor ofVermeers estate was her than Antoni van Leeuwehe most secretive lens-maker of his day.
In 1683 Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, but that was about as far as progress could getfor the tury and a half because of the limitations of microscope teology. Not until1831 would anyone first see the nucleus of a cell—it was found by the Scottish botanistRobert Brown, that frequent but always shadowy visitor to the history of sce. Brown, wholived from 1773 to 1858, called it nucleus from the Latin nucula, meaning little nut or kernel.
Not until 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular. It was TheodorSn, a German, who had this insight, and it was not only paratively late, as stifisights go, but not widely embraced at first. It wasn’t until the 1860s, and some landmarkwork by Louis Pasteur in Frahat it was shown clusively that life ot arisespontaneously but must e from preexisting cells. The belief became known as the “celltheory,” and it is the basis of all modern biology.
The cell has been pared to many things, from “a plex chemical refinery” (by thephysicist James Trefil) to “a vast, teemiropolis” (the biochemist Guy Brown). A cell isboth of those things aher. It is like a refinery in that it is devoted to chemical activityon a grand scale, and like a metropolis in that it is crowded and busy and filled withiions that seem fused and random but clearly have some system to them. But it is amuch more nightmarish place than any city or factory that you have ever seen. To begin withthere is no up or down ihe cell (gravity doesn’t meaningfully apply at the cellularscale), and not an atom’s width of space is uhere is activity every where and aceaseless thrum of electrical energy. You may not feel terribly electrical, but you are. Thefood we eat and the oxygen we breathe are bined in the cells iricity. The reasonwe don’t give each other massive shocks or scorch the sofa whe is that it is allhappening on a tiny scale: a mere 0.1 volts traveling distances measured in naers.
However, scale that up and it would translate as a jolt of twenty million volts per meter, aboutthe same as the charge carried by the main body of a thuorm.
Whatever their size or shape, nearly all your cells are built to fually the same plan:
they have an outer g or membrane, a nucleus wherein resides the necessary geiation to keep you going, and a busy space betweewo called the cytoplasm. Themembrane is not, as most of us imagi, a durable, rubbery g, something that youwould need a sharp pin to prick. Rather, it is made up of a type of fatty material known as alipid, which has the approximate sistency “of a light grade of mae oil,” to quoteSherwin B. Nuland. If that seems surprisingly insubstantial, bear in mind that at themicroscopic level things behave differently. To anything on a molecular scale water beesa kind of heavy-duty gel, and a lipid is like iron.
If you could visit a cell, you wouldn’t like it. Blown up to a scale at which atoms wereabout the size of peas, a cell itself would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supportedby a plex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millionsof objects—some the size of basketballs, others the size of cars—would whiz about likebullets. There wouldn’t be a place you could stand without being pummeled and rippedthousands of times every sed from every dire. Even for its full-time octs theinside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damagedonce every 8.4 seds—ten thousand times in a day—by chemicals and ents thatwhato or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be swiftly stitched upif the cell is not to perish.
The proteins are especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into each other up to abillion times a sed. Ehemselves a type of protein, dash everywhere, perfup to a thousand tasks a sed. Like greatly speeded up worker ants, they busily build andrebuild molecules, hauling a piece off this one, adding a piece to that one. Some monitorpassing proteins and mark with a chemical those that are irreparably damaged or flawed. Onceso selected, the doomed proteins proceed to a structure called a proteasome, where they arestripped down and their pos used to build new proteins. Some types of proteifor less than half an hour; others survive for weeks. But all lead existehat areinceivably frenzied. As de Duve notes, “The molecular world must necessarily remaiirely beyond the powers of our imagination owing to the incredible speed with whichthings happen in it.”
But slow things down, to a speed at which the iions be observed, and thingsdon’t seem quite so unnerving. You see that a cell is just millions of objects—lysosomes,endosomes, ribosomes, ligands, peroxisomes, proteins of every size and shape—bumping intomillions of other objects and perf muasks: extrag energy from nutrients,assembling structures, getting rid of waste, warding off intruders, sending and receivingmessages, making repairs. Typically a cell will tain some 20,000 different types of protein,and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules. “Thismeans,” says Nuland, “that even if we t only those molecules present in amounts of morethan 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in eachcell. Such a staggering figure gives some idea of the swarming immensity of biochemicalactivity within us.”
It is all an immensely demanding process. Your heart must pump 75 gallons of blood anhour, 1,800 gallons every day, 657,000 gallons in a year—that’s enough to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools—to keep all those cells freshly oxygenated. (And that’s at rest. Duringexercise the rate increase as much as sixfold.) The oxygen is taken up by themitodria. These are the cells’ power stations, and there are about a thousand of them in atypical cell, though the number varies siderably depending on what a cell does and howmuergy it requires.
You may recall from an earlier chapter that the mitodria are thought to have inatedas captive bacteria and that they now live essentially as lodgers in our cells, preserving theirowistrus, dividing to their own timetable, speaking their own language. Youmay also recall that we are at the mercy of their goodwill. Here’s why. Virtually all the foodand oxygen you take into your body are delivered, after processing, to the mitodria,where they are verted into a molecule called adenosiriphosphate, or ATP.
You may not have heard of ATP, but it is what keeps you going. ATP molecules areessentially little battery packs that move through the cell providing energy for all the cell’sprocesses, and you get through a lot of it. At any given moment, a typical cell in your bodywill have about one billion ATP molecules in it, and in two minutes every one of them willhave been drained dry and another billion will have taken their place. Every day you produd use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight. Feel the warmth ofyour skin. That’s your ATP at work.
When cells are no longer hey die with what only be called great dignity. Theytake down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour theirpo parts. The process is knooptosis rammed cell death. Every daybillions of your cells die for your be and billions of others up the mess. Cells also die violently—for instance, when ied—b<cite>..</cite>ut mostly they die because they are told to.
Indeed, if not told to live—if not given some kind of active instru from another cell—cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.
When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but ratherbegins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cer. cer cells are really justfused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaboratemeisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of trol. Onaverage, humans suffer oal malignancy for eaillion billion cell divisions.
cer is bad lu every possible sense of the term.
The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally g, but that they manageeverything so smoothly for decades at a stretch. They do so by stantly sending andmonit streams of messages—a cacophony of messages—from all around the body:
instrus, queries, corres, requests for assistance, updates, notices to divide or expire.
Most of these signals arrive by means of couriers called hormones, chemical entities such asinsulin, adrenalirogen, aosterohat vey information from remote outpostslike the thyroid and endoe glands. Still other messages arrive by telegraph from the brainor frional ters in a process called parae signaling. Finally, cells unicatedirectly with their neighbors to make sure their as are coordinated.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is all just random frantic a, a sequence ofendless enters directed by nothing more thaal rules of attra and repulsion.
There is clearly no thinking presence behind any of the as of the cells. It all just happens,smoothly aedly and so reliably that seldom are we even scious of it, yet somehowall this produot just order within the cell but a perfect harmht across the anism.
In ways that we have barely begun to uand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemicalreas add up to a mobile, thinking, deaking you—or, e to that, a rather lessreflective but still incredibly anized dule. Every living thing, never fet, is awonder of atomigineering.
Indeed, some anisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular anizationthat makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passihrough a sieve, for instahen dump them into a solution, and they will find theirway back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You do this to them overand over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other livingthing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to tio be.
And that’s because of a curious, determined, barely uood molecule that is itself notalive and for the most part doesn’t do anything at all. We call it DNA, and to begin touand its supreme importao sd to us we o go back 160 years or so toVictorian England and to the moment wheuralist Charles Darwin had what has beencalled “the single best idea that anyone has ever had”—and then, for reasons that take a littleexplaining, locked it away in a drawer for the fifteen years.
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