h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Surely footnote number 5 is wrong,

The human body contains about 1x1014 cells (that's a 1 followed by 14 zeros), 10% of which actually belong to us.

It all comes down to mass for us to be US and not a quivering pile of bacterial ooze then the 10% of cells that are our own bodies must be enourmous compared to the 90% of friendly bacteria.

We may be covered in bacteria and have billions inside us but the total weight of those cells must be less than the total weight of the cells that make up us.

I'm not sure if this explaination make sense but I'd like to see more clarification on the footnote.

Eukaryotic (our) cells are considerably larger than prokaryotic (bacterial) cells, so you cannot calculate mass by just counting them all up. The article just talks about numbers of cells and not mass.

Hope this clears things up.

Ste

yeah thats sort of what I was asking/stating that OUR (Eukaryotic ) cells must be bigger than the bacterial ones if the 90% to 10% factor was true, otherwise we'd looking like a big pile of bacteria!

Eukaryotic cells care about 100-1000 times the volume of prokaryotic cells. Just look at mitochondria (former prokaryotic symbionts) inside our cells.



Ste