Thread: 10 Trillion cells in us? I have novice q's about this stat

I am aware that this is probably a t best a guestimate of how many of the 200 different types of specialized cells inhabit and manfest us humans. My questions are:

When was this statatistic (that is now used everywhere) dropped, and by who or whom?

Would a midget or "small person" have say only 4 Trillion and Yao Ming 12 or 13 Trillion? More focused I will ask, do the size of all the possible human cells remain the same across all humans, and physical stature is only a difference in the number of cells one posseses? Or is a larger indivual a reflection of larger individual cells? My logical guess is that a larger individual just has more accumulated cells instead of bigger ones.

But aren't some indivual cells larger in some people that others? What would be an example of this, besides sperm cells?

Do you ever trip out during your daily social life looking at people and can't help thinking of them as enormously complex lego models?

Thanks and I apologize if these questions are below the shared I.Q. of the users of this forum. I'm just getting started really trying to understand nature, and I will be around here asking alot of questions and bouncing off of and using all your knowledge. Nice to meet you guys in advance!

Originally Posted by Sol Daddy

Thanks and I apologize if these questions are below the shared I.Q. of the users of this forum.

I'm not sure shared IQ is a valid concept for unlinked neural systems as can be found in the average human cranium.

The shared IQ will therefore resemble that of the highest IQ (he represents the maximum output in IQ), or if this one doesn't speak up, the IQ of whoever does answer.



It is possible to count all the cells in the human body. All you need to do is to cut the human body into small cubes and make histological sections of those, stain them, and count cells.

Unfortunately this will require a financial effort of rather large proportions, not to mention the ethical consequences.

One could of course take a sample and guestimate.

Or a small animal, count the cells, and extrapolate.

Whatever the answer is, the amount of cells is dwarfed by the amount of prokaryotes living on us.

http://www52.wolframalpha.com/input/...lls+human+body

Originally Posted by spuriousmonkey

Whatever the answer is, the amount of cells is dwarfed by the amount of prokaryotes living on us.

And which may well affect our own physiology, including behaviour and self-identity!



One ex:

http://www.tourettesyndrome.net/pandas.htm

Leading to all manner of philosophical questions surrounding identity and what it actually means to be human in the first place.

Ah, I seem to have worded the content of my idea inaccurately. What I meant when I said the whole "shared I.Q." thing was that I'm sure evan a nontypical poster on a science forum would find my question elementary stuff. I'm sure you know what I meant Spurious, and I'm pretty sure you have still given yourself a high five for correcting me trivially and providing a link that states information that is already cited WITHIN the question I actually asked. Just a guess, in good fun

But on a probably dubious sidenote....the idea of mind seperate from body is rediculous, and the seperation of body from the enviroment is equally so. Every action has a reaction on this planet, and that includes everything you do and think and physically are. They are all "chainlinked" together by chemistry. So yes, I would call the whole of this process being a massive collective, or "shared" being the word I so incorrectly used, entity. What is I.Q. anyway? Your thinking threshold. You are just part of the process. Go deep enough, and unlinked brain nueron systems still don't mean humans aren't just metaphorical fish in the school, following someone or some enviromental cue you "learned" from. Data between brains are transferred by sound and vision and other senses. It's all wireless, baby! And in the math around you.

I am off to research about cell size and contributing factors. SOrry for the rambling, i have never been able to chain my thoughts without alot of yap.

Im donating my body to science, maybe theyll use me to count cells ay? It would be damn appropriate

Counting cells is really a shit job.

It is done in various ways depending on the experimental setup. In my field one of the standard method is to count for instance proliferation. For this you sometimes are forced to count all the proliferating cells and compare the amounts between the experimental set up and the control.

This is done in my field on mouse tissues in developing organs. These are tiny!

Yet it takes forever to count just the proliferating cells (if you do it properly).

There is some software to help you with this, but often the counting is just done manually.

Now imagine that it is a bitch to count the amount of cells in an organ of such a size that you can hardly see it without a microscope. Imagine you would have to count cells in a massive system like a whole human being, or organ.

It's probably a project on the scale of the human genome project. Yet there are no immediate benefits to be had from knowing the exact number.

Aren't approximate number of cells per cubic mm known for various organs ?