![]() ![]() ![]() Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Most of the people who are prime candidates for heart attacks don’t get heart attacks. What is perhaps most remarkable is that nothing is in charge.įive out of every six smokers won’t get lung cancer. That’s why you have enough to stretch to Pluto and beyond. Every cell in your body (strictly speaking, every cell with a nucleus) holds two copies of your DNA. You would need twenty billion strands of DNA laid side by side to make the width of the finest human hair. The reason so much DNA can fit into a cell nucleus is that it is exquisitely thin. It contains the cell’s DNA-three feet of it, as we have already noted, scrunched into a space that we may reasonably call infinitesimal. You are in the most literal sense cosmic. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. ![]() You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. ![]() Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. ![]()
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