The $6,000,000 Man
So I know a couple of weeks ago I told you about a speech my professor gave us on our last day of class and I actually recorded it on my phone. I was listening to it last night and thought about the story he was telling before he got to the part that I last blogged about. After thinking, I just knew I could probably find it on the internet to share with you. Well I did and this is it.The $6,000,000 Man.
Well, time passes (such as it does). It was again my father’s birthday and time for another humorous reminder of the annual event. I was perusing the birthday cards in a local department store when I came across a very cute card:
“According to biochemists, the materials that make up the human body are worth only 97 cents.” (Hallmark Greeting Card Co.) An underestimation, I thought.
With this card in mind, I toyed with the idea of calculating just how much the average human body is worth. So I and a friend (who was interested in biochemistry) sat down to figure out just how much a human body could fetch on the fair market exchange. Using a biochemical supply catalog, we investigated the price of the various chemicals and came up with some shocking results. Human DNA was $770 per gram. Hemoglobin was $3 a gram. Insulin was $48 per gram. Follicle-stimulating hormone (or FSH) was relatively expensive (about $4,900,000 per gram). A righteous amount of bucks, we concluded.
We averaged all the chemicals per gram (dry weight) of a human being, arriving at $250.25 per gram. Human beings are approximately 70% water, so we calculated my dry weight as 24,545 g. Next we calculated how much the average human body was worth. The final amount was most gratifying: $6,142,386.30. Not bad, I concluded gleefully. I’m a six million dollar man, and I can’t even run 60 miles per hour.
One must here draw a balance between a human being and a bunch of chemicals from a supply catalog. If it were possible to purchase these chemicals, you would not purchase a human being, but merely an assembly of molecules. But why the discrepancy between the 97 cent figure and the calculated one? The answer is easy. By paying for thevarious proteins and hormones, one is paying for those chemicals which are high up in the genetic ladder, while carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and water are relatively cheap and easy to come by. For example, proteins are long folded chains of amino acids which are commercially available for anywhere between $3 and $12,000 per gram. However, the smaller molecular weight amino acids are somewhere around 30 cents a gram. Thus we see a cost difference in the size and complexity of the chemicals.
As we learn in science courses at a very young age, cells form tissues, tissues form organs, and organs form systems. As we progress we learn that the cell itself is made up of smaller units called organelles. One of the organelles is ribosome. The cost of assembling DNA and proteins from ribosomes is phenomenal. To synthesize a human being from organelles is prohibitively expensive, in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Next we must form cells, and then tissues. Organs must then be created and then the organs formed into systems and finally into a living, breathing human being. The cost at each step becomes progressively higher as the complexity of the process increases. An incomprehensible task, to say the least. Thus the naked truth faces us, and we quickly realize that each human being is priceless.
by Gerry Marangoni
Posts
0 comments: