What Are Cells In The Human Body – Unfortunately, your cells can’t fill out census forms, so they can’t tell you themselves. And while it’s easy enough to look through a microscope and count out certain types of cells, this method isn’t practical either. Some types of cells are easy to spot, while others—like tangled neurons—weave themselves in obscurity. Even if you could count ten cells every second, it would take you tens of thousands of years to complete the count. Also, there would be some logistical problems you would encounter when counting all the cells in your Body – for example, cutting up your own body into tiny patches for microscopic viewing.
For now, the best we can hope for is a study published recently in the Annals of Human Biology, titled, with admirable clarity, “An Estimate of the Number of Cells in the Human Body.”
What Are Cells In The Human Body
The authors – a team of researchers from Italy, Greece and Spain – admit that they are hardly the first to tackle this question. They looked back at scientific journals and books from past centuries and found many estimates. But these estimates spanned a huge range, from 5 billion to 200 million trillion cells. And virtually none of the researchers who offered these numbers provided an explanation for how they arrived at them. Clearly, this is a topic ripe for research.
Facts About Cells
If scientists can’t count all the cells in a human body, how can they estimate it? The average weight of a cell is 1 nanogram. For an adult man weighing 70 kilograms, simple arithmetic would lead us to conclude that that man has 70 trillion cells.
On the other hand, it is also possible to make this calculation based on the volume of cells. The average volume of a mammalian cell is estimated to be 4 billionths of a cubic centimeter. (To get a sense of that size, check out The Scale of the Universe.) Based on the typical volume of an adult male, you can conclude that the human body contains 15 trillion cells.
So if you choose volume or weight, you get drastically different numbers. To make matters worse, our bodies are not packed with cells in a uniform manner, like a jar full of jellybeans. Cells come in different sizes and they grow at different densities. Look at a beaker of blood, for example, and you’ll find that the red blood cells are tightly packed. If you used their density to estimate the cells in a human body, you would arrive at a staggering 724 trillion cells. Skin cells, on the other hand, are so sparse that they would give you a paltry estimate of 35 billion cells.
So the author of the new paper decided to estimate the number of cells in the body the hard way and break it down by organ and cell type. (They didn’t attempt to enumerate all the microbes that also call our bodies home, sticking only to human cells.) They scoured the scientific literature for details on the volume and density of cells in gallbladders, knee joints, intestines, bone marrow, and many other tissues. They then came up with estimates for the total number of each type of cell. For example, they estimate that we have 50 billion fat cells and 2 billion heart muscle cells.
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This is not a final number, but it is a very good start. While it’s true that humans can vary in size—and thus vary in the number of cells—adult humans don’t vary in size except in the movies. The scientists declare with great confidence that the usual estimate of one trillion cells in the human body is incorrect. But they see their estimate as an opportunity for collaboration—perhaps through an online database compiled by many experts on many different body parts—to get a better estimate.
Curiosity is legitimate enough to consider how many cells the human body contains, but there can also be scientific merit in determining the number. Scientists learn about the human body by building sophisticated computer models of lungs and hearts and other organs. If these models have ten times as many cells as real organs have, their results can swing wildly off the mark.
The number of cells in an organ is also important for certain medical conditions. The authors of the new study find that a healthy liver has 240 billion cells in it, for example, but some studies of cirrhosis have found that the diseased organ has as few as 172 billion.
Perhaps most importantly, the very fact that some 34 trillion cells can cooperate for decades to give rise to a single human body instead of a chaotic war of selfish microbes is amazing. The development of even a basic level of multicellularity is remarkable enough. But our ancestors went far beyond a simple mushroom-like anatomy, and developed a large collective of many different types. To understand that collective on a deep level, we need to know how big it really is.
Scientists Have Basically No Idea How Many Cells Are In The Human Body
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How Many Cells Are There In The Human Body?
Early cells, also called stem cells, are undifferentiated. This means that they have the potential to become any cell, but that they have not specialized. Once a certain number of cells have been formed, new cells begin to differentiate and become unique cells, with a very specific purpose.
Cells come in about 200 different types, and each one has a special role in the body. They come in different sizes and shapes, and even different lifespans.
When cells die or are damaged, they must be replaced, so cell division is a process that continues throughout our lives. Every day, the human body makes about 300 billion new cells. More than half of these are red blood cells, which last only about 120 days and are constantly being replaced. This is a completely normal process.
With a few important exceptions, when healthy cells divide, they are preprogrammed to become a specific kind of cell, and there are checks on whether they can replicate themselves. They also have a programmed age limit, after which they naturally die and are replaced.
Structural Organization Of The Human Body
A tumor occurs when there is a mistake in the copying process and the replicated cell is incorrect. The worst mistake is that they keep replicating themselves without any limit. In addition, they are often unspecialized or undifferentiated, so they serve no purpose and do not go through normal cell life cycles.
As the cells continue to divide, they can eventually form a lump, or mass, that affects the part of the body where they live. This body part may then not be able to function properly, or may not function at all.
Benign tumors are non-cancerous and do not spread beyond their original boundary, meaning they do not affect other tissues. For this reason, they may not be harmful. But some benign tumors change and become malignant or cancerous. These tumors can then invade surrounding tissues and damage more of the body. Cancer cells can also influence nearby healthy cells to form blood vessels that bring nutrients and oxygen to the tumor and remove waste products, helping it grow.
When cancer cells are found in just one area, it is called cancer in situ. Many cancers start this way, forming a lump that may be surgically removed. Unfortunately, cancer cells do not always remain isolated, and cells can break away from the mass and travel to other parts of the body, where they form new cancers; this process is called metastasis.
How Many Cells Are In Your Body?
Other cancers form in parts of the body such as the lymph nodes and blood system. Because these are the body’s highways, moving cells around the body, these cancers are not localized and spread quickly and easily. When cells from solid tumors break off and enter the blood or lymphatic system, they can spread throughout the body as well.
Due to the number of new cells being made every day, mistakes will inevitably be made from time to time. Normally, when a cell is damaged or defective, it is detected as faulty by the immune system and destroyed. But sometimes the mistakes, or mutations, that made the cell cancerous mean that the immune system can’t detect them, which is why they can grow without restriction and spread throughout the body. This is when
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