A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [186]
Only slightly less devoted, and certainly more unexpected, was Alfred C. Kinsey, who became famous for his studies of human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. But before his mind became filled with sex, so to speak, Kinsey was an entomologist, and a dogged one at that. In one expedition lasting two years, he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection of 300,000 wasps. How many stings he collected along the way is not, alas, recorded.
Something that had been puzzling me was the question of how you assured a chain of succession in these arcane fields. Clearly there cannot be many institutions in the world that require or are prepared to support specialists in barnacles or Pacific snails. As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.
He chuckled rather heartily at my naiveté. “I'm afraid it's not as if we have substitutes sitting on the bench somewhere waiting to be called in to play. When a specialist retires or, even more unfortunately, dies, that can bring a stop to things in that field, sometimes for a very long while.”
“And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?”
“Precisely,” he said, “precisely.” And he really seemed to mean it.
24 CELLS
IT STARTS WITH a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and 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 to spring forth as a human being.*39 And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of conception to your last breath.
You have no secrets from your cells. They know far more about you than you do. Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code—the instruction manual for your body—so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body. Never in your life will you have to remind a cell to keep an eye on its adenosine triphosphate levels or to find a place for the extra squirt of folic acid that's just unexpectedly turned up. It will do that for you, and millions more things besides.
Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.
But yeast cells are as nothing compared with human cells, which are not just more varied and complicated, but vastly more fascinating because of their complex interactions.
Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn't a thing they don't do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in junior high school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won't forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defense the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.
We understand a little of how cells do the