The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson
Publication year: 2019
Arabic translation: Not yet translated
Number of pages: 464 pages
In the introduction to his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, published in 2003, the American traveler and historian Bill Bryson mentions a defining moment in his life: “much later – I believe about four or five years ago – I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at the moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren’t. Didn’t have the faintest idea. I didn’t know if the oceans were growing more salty with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned about or not… ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. I didn’t know what a proton was, or a protein, didn’t know a quark from a quasar… So I decided that I would devote a portion of my life-three years, as it now turns out-to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions.”
That moment of contemplation resulted in Bryson’s most famous book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which the author explored the universe, the Earth, and the sciences related to them. He also recounted in an entertaining and attractive manner the biographies of the scientists who unlocked the secrets of the universe and nature. The book was a simplistic scientific journey for the non-specialized reader who may find it difficult to read focused scientific books with their rigid templates and terminology that do not welcome outsiders.
The Linguist and the Traveler
A Short History of Nearly Everything represented a turning point in Bryson’s writing career. The American and English author, for more than twenty years, which he spent between America and England, was specialized in writing about topics related to the English language and the author’s travels around the world, starting with his 1984 book, The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, passing through The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America 1989, The Mother Tongue, English And How It Got That Way 1990, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe 1992, and Made in America, An Informal History of the English Language in the United States 1994, and Notes from a Small Island 1996.
Therefore, this book was a new line for the author in presenting science and knowledge to readers in the author’s easy and funny style, and the success of the book and the successive editions and translations into many languages motivated the author to repeat the experience.
At Home
In 2010, Bryson published a new book entitled At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Just as his first book was an exploration of the universe and nature as a home for the human race, his next book came to explore the house as an individual’s home. Thus, Bryson devoted each chapter of the book to a specific part of the home, such as the entrance, the kitchen, the cellar, the attic, and the garden. In each chapter, he asked and answered many questions that might come to the mind of the reader who lives in these places every day of his life without knowing the history and formation of these intimate places, which in turn shaped contemporary man.
How to Build a Human?
Bryson’s journey, which began with the universe and nature and passed through the house, reaches in his last book the smallest universe or the first home, which is the human body. As long as we have set out to scatter questions about the universe and nature to heal our ignorance of them, why don’t we ask about our bodies? How much do we know about this body? What are its components, functions and causes?
Bryson opens with a chapter entitled “How to Build a Human,” in which he tells us an exciting piece of information that he heard in his teens from a biology teacher. This information says that all the chemicals that make up the human body do not cost more than five dollars in the market. Bryson sets out to verify this information and reports the Royal Society of Chemistry calculations, which concluded that the human body consists of 59 elements. Six of these elements represent 99.1% of the body. These basic elements are “carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.” Oxygen dominates the highest percentage, 61% of the body, and when united with hydrogen, which represents a percentage of 10%, they form water, which is why it is said that 70% of the human body is water. Bryson proceeds to deconstruct and price the human body, citing the Royal Society’s findings, to conclude that the market costs of the 59 items are actually more than $150,000, an amount far exceeding the teacher’s five dollars.
This funny scientific experiment, which preoccupied Bryson and the Royal Society, makes us confirm that the human body is not the sum of its elements. Even if all these materials were available, we cannot simply create a human body, let alone its soul and mind, and from here begins the journey of the author, and of course the reader, in exploring the body with all its wonders. The body is a factory and a workshop that does not rest and does not stop working and producing except at death, of course.
The Outside: Skin and Hair
It is natural that the journey begins from the outer shell that envelops and preserves the human body, the skin and the hair that covers it. The skin is the largest human organ, with a size of two square meters and a weight approaching seven kilograms. The skin is the thinnest on the eyelids, and the thickest on the feet and hands. The skin sheds one million cells every hour, and between 2 and 5 million hairs penetrate it while twice that number of sweat glands lie beneath it.
Hair follicles perform a double task: they grow hair and secrete a type of fat, which, when mixed with sweat, creates a layer that insulates and protects the skin. In some cases, the pores become clogged with dead skin and dry fat, resulting in what is known as blackheads. In other cases, the follicles may become inflamed, resulting in pimples. Excessive sebaceous glands, as in teenagers, cause annoying pimples and acne.
The skin also contains neural sensors. These sensors are what make us feel the world around us, from the gust of air to the sting of fire. Among the most famous of these sensors are Meissner particles, which were named after their discoverer, the German scientist Georg Meissner. These particles pick up the softest touches and the lightest impacts and are found on the fingertips, lips, tongue and sensitive organs.
Skin color is determined by a different group of pigments, the most famous of which is melanin, and this is linked to exposure to the sun and the skin’s extraction of Vitamin D from it. This is why 50% of people suffer from a deficiency in Vitamin D. This deficiency increases in cold countries where the sun is absent throughout the year, reaching up to 90% of the population.
The Body as a Universe: Microbes
Our bodies seem like a universe of billions of microbes that live on and within them. The good thing is that most of these microbes are beneficial and provide a service to our bodies. Even though we may not live long if some of these microbes disappear, there are microbes that help our bodies digest food and extract the calories that the body needs. When the human body produces 20 digestive enzymes, bacteria produce 10,000 enzymes that help us digest food and absorb beneficial substances from it. These microbes are distinguished by their high ability to adapt, and the speed of their reproduction. For example, coliform bacteria reproduce 72 times in one day, and this means that they can produce 20 thousand generations in the same amount of time it takes for humans to produce one generation.
The human body is home to forty thousand species of microbes, 900 species in the nose, 800 species in the inside of the cheeks, and 1,300 species in the gums, in addition to the 36 thousand species that inhabit the digestive system. As for the numbers of these microbes, they are in the billions. A study conducted in 2016 concluded that for every 30 trillion human cells, there are between 30 and 50 trillion microbial cells. Of course, the size of a human cell is very large compared to a microbial cell, and this is what makes microbes not visible in the human body.
Microbes are transmitted between humans through many normal or intimate human activities. A study estimated that kisses transfer a billion microbes from mouth to mouth, but a very small percentage of these microbes are harmful. Of the million microbes known to science, only 1,415 microbes are related to diseases that affect humans.
The Brain: The Biggest Mystery
The human brain consists of 75% – 80% water, and the remaining percentage is divided between fats and protein. It weighs 1,300 grams of this spongy material that produced the entire human civilization. This brain can process as much information in thirty seconds as it took the Hubble Space Telescope thirty years to process, and the human brain can store information equivalent to the capacity of all the digital content of the world today.
To carry out its work, this important organ requires approximately 20% of the body’s energy, which is equivalent to 400 calories. This percentage increases in newborns to reach 65%. Perhaps for this reason, infants sleep a lot, as the brain’s high energy consumption is exhausting, and this consumption is not related to excessive thinking, as all brains, from the most intelligent to the least intelligent, consume the same amount of energy.
The Heart, the Engine that Never Stops
The heart beats nonstop – except at death – one hundred thousand beats a day, approximately 3.5 billion beats in a lifetime. These pulses push blood around the body and back to the heart with extraordinary force. This driving force can be identified by observing the strong rush of blood when the aorta is cut in animals. The heart distributes in one hour the equivalent of 265 liters of blood. This hectic work that does not stop throughout the hours of the day and night is equivalent if measured by the effort required to lift a car weighing one ton to a distance of 240 kilometers in the sky.
Every time the heart distributes blood to the body, 15% of it goes to the brain, while the largest percentage, approximately 20%, goes to the kidneys. The blood’s entire journey around the body takes approximately fifty seconds, during which the blood performs several functions. In addition to transporting oxygen to cells, blood transports hormones and some important chemicals. White blood cells also protect the body from viruses and microbes, and blood also helps control body temperature.
More Secrets
The chapters of the book continue to provide us with more information and secrets about our bodies, about bones, movement and balance, about the immune system and lungs, about food and the digestive system, sleep and reproduction, nerves and pain, and diseases that destroy this body, with an entire chapter that the author devotes to cancer. There are also chapters on medicine and treatment, with its good and bad, and a final chapter on the end of this body, when the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, and the brain stops distributing its signals, so the body turns into a corpse that has lost its soul and has become food for those beings that inhabited it.
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