Our Bodies, Our Cells: An audio exploration of life's building blocks
Our body is made up of 37 trillion cells that are at once independent yet interconnected
*Originally published on Jan. 31, 2024.
Life is complicated. Beautiful. Bewildering. Astonishing. Busy.
And that's just on the level of our conscious experience. But if you look closely at the sheer amount of stuff and activity in our bodies, the level of sophistication and complexity is almost impossible to comprehend.
For a start, consider what the cell is: a protein factory, a shipping and receiving bay, an information processor, an energy generator and a communications hub in a network of trillions of other cells. Consider, too, that the human body has around 37 trillion of them. A trillion may just sound like a bigger "million," but it's equivalent to the number of seconds there are in 1.2 million years.
It gets even more astonishing: each cell is a world unto itself, jammed full of nanomachines and millions of moving parts. In an extraordinary feat of coordination, each cell is also connected to the rest of the body, fine-tuned to perform its own functions and yet respond to the body's overall needs.
It gets weirder as you zoom in even more and get to the atomic level. At the heart of the atom is the nucleus, with electrons orbiting it. But imagine that the outer radius of an atom is a cathedral. In the middle would be nucleus, which makes up 99.5 percent of the mass of the atom: it would be the size of a fly. The radius of the atom is 10,000 times greater than the nucleus. The rest: empty space. Nothing.
And it gets almost incomprehensible when you consider this last fact: if you took the empty space from every atom in every living human being right now — about eight billion people — and you scrunched together all the matter that's left over, it would be about the size of a sugar cube.
Welcome to the world of Our Bodies, Our Cells, a documentary exploring the microscopic cosmos of the body, by Aaron Collier, theatre performer and electronic composer, and IDEAS producer Chris Wodskou. The closer they zoomed in, the closer they got to some of the fundamental truths about life and found it even stranger and more wondrous and paradoxical than they could have imagined.
WATCH | The Inner Life of a Cell, animated by XVIVO.com
Guests in this episode:
David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator, animator and medical director of award-winning The Inner Life of the Cell, produced for Harvard's Molecular and Cellular Biology Department.
Nick Lane is a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London and an award-winning author of The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life and Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.
Sarah Otto is a Killam professor and Canada Research Chair in theoretical and experimental evolution at the University of British Columbia.
Suzie Sheehy is an accelerator physicist at the University of Melbourne and author of The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbably Experiments Changed the World.
*The documentary Our Bodies, Our Cells was produced by Aaron Collier and Chris Wodskou. Music composed, performed and recorded by Aaron Collier.
