The Body – A Guide for the occupants is written by Bill Bryson and published in 2020. This is second book of Bryson that I had a chance to read. The other one was A Walk in the woods which was about the celebrated Appalachian trail. I have few others already on my TBR list.

Here is a post that I wrote sometime back on a similar topic. I think everyone would agree that human body after millions of years of evolution things have been fine tuned quite a bit and is one of the best designed systems in itself.

For most of the people who have studied Biology sometime in life and have liked the subject will find this refreshing many ways. For others who haven’t been exposed this will definitely spike their interest in the human body and how the current understanding has been the work of dedicated scientists for hundreds of years. The book has over 80 pages in Notes on Sources, Bibliography and Index which I guess is fine but was generally thinking if this could have been a link where folks could have gone and looked up which would have saved paper as well reduced the weight of the book.

The book is organized into chapters that are self contained and gives understanding of that particular topic like Skin & Hair, Brain, Head and  others is divided in about 22 chapters. There are so many nice and intriguing things in the book and I will bring few on them here as snippets.

Snippets from the Book

If someone had to source raw materials for making a human body, 99.1% will constitute carbon, oxygen, hydrogen,  nitrogen, calcium and phosphorous. There are many other required like molybdenum, vanadium, thorium, manganese, tin, copper in smaller quantities. Royal Society of Chemistry has estimated that if Benedict Cumberbatch was taken an a new human being as a template it will take about 96,546.79 pounds to be precise. But its is realistically impossible for us to put all this raw material together to create a human being that has estimated 32.7 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.

Microbial life on earth is so huge that if one puts all the microbes in one heap and animals on the other heap, the microbial heap will be 25 times greater than the animal one. This planet is for microbes and we are here at their pleasure and 2020 probably is a reminder for this generation.

All mammals have about 800 million heartbeats in them if they live a average life and we human are only exceptions as we pass 800 million heartbeats after twenty-five years of life but most of the times our heart beats continue for another fifty years.

Looks like Pharma companies encourage people who go on vacation to collect soil samples. One such instance is about Mr. H P Frey of Sandoz Labs collected samples during his Norwegian vacation and fortunately the samples contained a fungus that helped to develop drugs that helped to suppress immune responses resulting in revolution in human transplants. So many medical discoveries are attributed to chance and every story is very interesting.

Unit 731 was a Japanese facility where horrific experiments were conducted like the Nazi Camps and was kept a secret for a long time. Shiro Ishi was the physician who conceived and led the effort. The researchers involved were given immunity by the US in exchange of the data gathered from human experimentation.   

Mitochondrial Eve is in a sense mother of us all. Women pass their mitochondrial DNA during conception and unbelievingly mitochondrial pool for humans have shrunk so much that we all are now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Washing hands have become so universal in 2020 and all that goes back to a medical instructor Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that if doctors washed their hands before conducting intimate examinations disease vanished. Unfortunately nobody listened to him in his lifetime and he was eventually confined to asylum and beaten to death. Its also common that more often people don’t get credit in their lifetime of their work that has changed humanity for good.

Nursing mothers produce over 200 kinds of complex sugars that their babies cannot digest because humans lack necessary enzymes and they are produced purely for the benefit of baby’s gut microbes as bribes. There is also evidence that a nursing mother absorbs a little of her suckling baby’s saliva through her breast ducts and that this is analyzed by her immune system which adjusts the amount and types of antibodies she supplies to the babies according to its needs. Many of the feedback mechanism that no other milk formula in the market can establish.

There are many more interesting things that Bryson has collected through his interviews and research. There is no doubt that learning about our own bodies is mind boggling and amazing and takes huge effort from the humankind. Looking at the progress that has been made to what is left to explore is truly humbling. 

 

A quote at the end of the book that reflects the very basic tenet

“Eat Sensibly, Exercise Regularly, Die Anyway”

 

Rating: 8/10