You could call together all the brainiest people who are alive now or have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of human knowledge, and they could not between them make a single living cell, never mind a replicant Benedict Cumberbatch.”Īnd there isn’t just one “immune system”. But as Bryson writes: “It hardly matters. Calcium, phosphorus, potassium and a smattering of rarer elements make up the rest. It gets pricier when we get to carbon, which costs £44,300 for the 30lbs’ worth we typically contain. To run the numbers: you are 61 per cent oxygen (£8.90) and 10 per cent hydrogen (£16), mostly bound up together to make water. As The Body makes vividly clear, we are both mundane and miraculous: composed of a bunch of mostly everyday elements, pieced together in astonishingly complex systems that scientists today are still a long way from understanding. Or at least a human of the same dimensions as Benedict Cumberbatch does, according to a Royal Society of Chemistry calculation that Bryson cites.
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