The Body: A Guide for Occupants

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.

thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

Altogether, according to the RSC, the full cost of building a new human being, using the obliging Benedict Cumberbatch as a template, would be a very precise $151,578.46. Labor and sales tax would, of course, boost costs further.

and kills them. Think of that. A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.

Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.

Of course, very occasionally a cancer develops into something more serious and possibly kills you, but overall cancers are rare: most cells in the body replicate billions and billions of times without going wrong. Cancer may be a common cause of death, but it is not a common event in life.

The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner.

DNA exists for just one purpose—to create more DNA.

It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers.