Bill Bryson - The Body: A Guide for Occupants

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 dont 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 dont 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 Britains 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 thesecarbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorusaccount 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 999,999,999 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 waterand 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 thats 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 bodys worth. But after that it gets pretty expensive.

You need about thirty pounds of carbon, and that will cost you $69,550, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. (They were using only the most purified forms of everything. The RSC would not make a human with cheap stuff.) Calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, though needed in much smaller amounts, would between them set you back a further $73,800. Most of the rest is even more expensive per unit of volume, but fortunately only needed in microscopic amounts. Thorium costs over $3,000 per gram but constitutes just 0.0000001 percent of you, so you can buy a bodys worth for thirty-three cents. All the tin you require can be yours for six cents, while zirconium and niobium will cost you just three cents apiece. The 0.000000007 percent of you that is samarium isnt apparently worth charging for at all. Its logged in the RSC accounts as costing $0.00.

Of the fifty-nine elements found within us, twenty-four are traditionally known as essential elements, because we really cannot do without them. The rest are something of a mixed bag. Some are clearly beneficial, some may be beneficial but we are not sure in what ways yet, others are neither harmful nor beneficial but are just along for the ride as it were, and a few are just bad news altogether. Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic. We have it in us not because our body craves it but because it gets into plants from the soil and then into us when we eat the plants. If you are from North America, you probably ingest about eighty micrograms of cadmium a day, and no part of it does you any good at all.