In celebration of that momentous centenary, Ernest Barnes, the bishop of Birmingham, delivered a commemorative sermon to a large audience at Liverpool Cathedral. “The most astonishing fact in the whole picture of . . . scientific progress,” Barnes said, “is man himself. The modern astronomer thinks in terms of thousands of millions of years and liv

Sir John Walker, who worked out the intricate molecular structure of ATP synthase, sums it up with Winston Churchill’s observation, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

A typical cell within you is made of a galaxy of atoms—a hundred trillion or so of them. A stack of that many dollar bills would reach to the Moon and back over twenty-five times. Every second within each of your cells, many hundreds of millions of molecules are shooting in and out of membranes. Thousands of genes are being locked and unlocked. Mil

On average, every molecule looking to react collides with every protein60 in the cell about once every second. Those ceaseless impacts send small water molecules zigzagging around your cells at the astonishing speed of over 1,000 miles an hour (although they only go about four billionths of an inch61 before they smack into another molecule). Somewh

Your cells contain a staggering number of structures, including DNA with about three billion base pairs, yet when you grow, heal, or replace a doddering cell, a cell can make a brand-new one in about only twenty-four hours. It would take me more than fifteen years to type out three billion letters, without taking the slightest break. How can our ce

You may not know it, but your life depends on a cool quadrillion or so minuscule sodium-potassium pumps56 (over a thousand million million of them). There is no way that you could live, much less think or escape predators, without those little machines. That, by the way, is why sodium chloride, or rather salt, tastes so good. Although the plants we

Scientists discovered that our nerves also use these pumps for something else. They send electrical messages, but not with electrons or protons. Researchers began learning how this works in 1939 when they found that, for defense, armorless giant squid rely mainly on fast escapes made possible by giant neurons. These nerves were so wide, investigato

On average, each of our cells contains a thousand to ten thousand mitochondria.48 Mitochondria take up about 35 percent of a heart muscle cell’s volume.49 They allow one of our cells to make tens of thousands of times more energy than a bacterium.50 With this supercaffeinated boost, our DNA can direct ribosomes to churn out many more proteins and e

Recall, as Lynn Margulis argued, that microbes dominated our planet until one type became especially efficient at producing energy. When one of these was engulfed by another cell, its descendants were domesticated. They became mitochondria, and the rest is history.