Comments on: How many cells are there in the human body?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 16:06:22 +0000

Treesong, I actually agree. The human body is made up of cells that originated from a fertilized gamete. All the other cells may be critically important, and the whole relationship is very important, but they are not part of the body, but rather, in a parasitic or symbiotic relationship with it.

Indeed, this all does tell us something interesting, but the interesting part is the very fact that these other cells are important yet not part of the body itself.

Also, consider the explanatory power that is lost. Across multicelled organisms, across mammals, across primates, across individuals in a given species (i.e, across humans) there may be a great deal of interesting and important viation in how many cells of each type, whether they are symbiotic, parastic, some other thing, etc. Conflating all the cells as part of a given body tends to obscure these interesting questions.

By: Treesong

Treesong — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 20:13:10 +0000

Coming to this a wee bit late, referred from a 2016 post…
A lot of quibbling could have been avoided if the title of the post had been ‘How many human/somatic cells are there in the human body?’ I’m on the ‘count the bacteria’ side because the result is more interesting. Whether the number of human cells is 10 or 37 or 100 trillion doesn’t matter much to most of us except for answering a trivia question. (‘37.2 trillion’ tells you something: that the answerer has a poor under standing of significant figures.) Whether the percentage of human cells is 1 or 10 or 50 tells you something interesting about the human body and opens you to learning about the intestinal flora.

By: Marco

Marco — Sat, 23 May 2015 12:23:54 +0000

Actually, it is likely closer to 37 trillion according to this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164

By: Wahab Abeeb

Wahab Abeeb — Sat, 23 May 2015 07:42:24 +0000

You have really done a good job, but lets try to be very sure of something before we post it. According to (SAB) it is said that all human being has up to 73 trillions of cell in the body. Although you really tried because you almost there. Thanks.

By: jack

jack — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:40:30 +0000

how many cells are there in the human body just a number of ALL CELLS DUMB

By: robin deen

robin deen — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 21:38:35 +0000

how many cell are really in a human body

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 17:09:13 +0000

Thanks Josh! Clearly I will have to update this post!

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:22:54 +0000

Turns out a group of researchers set out to accurately estimate the number of cells that comprise the human body (somatic, not microbial or other organisms that reside in/on our body) by more accurate means than simply weight or volume and they found it to be estimated at 37.2 trillion. You can read more about their process on the Smithsonian’s website.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/

By: Devinder

Devinder — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 01:47:59 +0000

The best estimated cell numbers should be based on weight of human body and the weight of a single cell of a category to be estimated.
For example if we want to calculate muscle cells in a person . We should know the weight of the person and the average weight of a human muscle cell.

By: rishi kesh

rishi kesh — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 14:11:41 +0000

The cells has more organ like us . example nucleus, ribosome and membrane and still more