How many cells are present in the body in an adult person?
A simple question deserves a simple answer. How many cells are in your body?
Unfortunately, your cells can’t fill out census forms, so they can’t tell you themselves. And while it’s easy enough to look through a microscope and count off certain types of cells, this method isn’t practical either. Some types of cells are easy to spot, while others–such as tangled neurons–weave themselves up into obscurity. Even if you could count ten cells each second, it would take you tens of thousands of years to finish counting. Plus, there would be certain logistical problems you’d encounter along the way to counter all the cells in your body–for example, chopping your own body up into tiny patches for microscopic viewing.
For now, the best we can hope for is a study published recently in Annals of Human Biology, entitled, with admirable clarity, “An Estimation of the Number of Cells in the Human Body.”
The authors–a team of scientists from Italy, Greece, and Spain–admit that they’re hardly the first people to tackle this question. They looked back over scientific journals and books from the past couple centuries and found many estimates. But those estimates sprawled over a huge range, from 5 billion to 200 million trillion cells. And practically none of the scientists who offered those numbers provided an explanation for how they came up with them. Clearly, this is a subject ripe for research.
If scientists can’t count all the cells in a human body, how can they estimate it? The mean weight of a cell is 1 nanogram. For an adult man weighing 70 kilograms, simple arithmetic would lead us to conclude that that man has 70 trillion cells.
On the other hand, it’s also possible to do this calculation based on the volume of cells. The mean volume of a mammal cell is estimated to be 4 billionths of a cubic centimeter. (To get a sense of that size, check out The Scale of the Universe.) Based on an adult man’s typical volume, you might conclude that the human body contains 15 trillion cells.
So if you pick volume or weight, you get drastically different numbers. Making matters worse, our bodies are not packed with cells in a uniform way, like a jar full of jellybeans. Cells come in different sizes, and they grow in different densities. Look at a beaker of blood, for example, and you’ll find that the red blood cells are packed tight. If you used their density to estimate the cells in a human body, you’d come to a staggering 724 trillion cells. Skin cells, on the other hand, are so sparse that they’d give you a paltry estimate of 35 billion cells.
So the author of the new paper set out to estimate the number of cells in the body the hard way, breaking it down into organs and cell types. (They didn’t try counting up all the microbes that also call our body home, sticking only to human cells.) They’ve scoured the scientific literature for details on the volume and density of cells in gallbladders, knee joints, intestines, bone marrow, and many other tissues. They then came up with estimates for the total number of each kind of cell. They estimate, for example, that we have 50 billion fat cells and 2 billion heart muscle cells.
Adding up all their numbers, the scientists came up with…drumroll…37.2 trillion cells.
This is not a final number, but it’s a very good start. While it’s true that people may vary in size–and thus vary in their number of cells–adult humans don’t vary by orders of magnitude except in the movies. The scientists declare with great confidence that the common estimate of a trillion cells in the human body is wrong. But they see their estimate as an opportunity for a collaboration–perhaps through an online database assembled by many experts on many different body parts–to zero in on a better estimate.
