How Alive Are We?

a disorganized, painful case-study of stupidity
Ok so a bit of a prologue before we get to the parodos of my blog post (that Oedipus reference was forced, even by my standards).

So this is that blog post that I alluded to last time (which you totally remember because you scrolled all the way down the Schoology discussion and read my blog, right??).
But alas, if for some odd reason you forgot:

“… I literally have an idea lined up and everything [for the 10/3 blog post], but I guess I have no motivation to write about it since it is no longer tied to an arbitrary point value (screw self-fulfillment or whatever that means)…”

Don't get it twisted, I’m not recycling this idea just because I already thought of it and I want my effort to be validated, but also because I think it loosely fits ('fits' is a bit of a stretch) with (one of) the topic(s) we’re supposed to be writing about this week.

Exhibit A:

“…oh, and you can also use a seed from an idea that came up in class…for this week’s blog [post]…”

-Mrs. Knudson, taken out of context (like it’s the Oedipus debate all over again)

Cross Examination:

Well Mrs.Knudson, you didn’t specify what class the seed had to be from, and I didn’t quote the part where you said the seed had to be from this week, so I’m gonna write about an idea I got from Anatomy class 6 weeks ago.

Another thing I should say: this blog post is messy, there were a lot of things that happened (don’t want to spoil what exactly) over the countless hours I spent writing this, but I've decided to keep all of it mostly un-trimmed because I think it's interesting (in more of a "laughing-at-me-not-with-me" kind of way).

If you aren't Mrs.Knudson who's trying to grade me on this, don't worry, the interesting stuff doesn't take that long to read, just skip to the not-boring parts (which objectively speaking means that you should've stopped reading this 5 minutes ago).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

So here it is:

(Btw Original text from 6 weeks ago= this)

Yeah, these guys

So I was feeling particularly science-y today (9/14/2022), and I decided to have a very philosophical discussion (with myself of course, in the shower, with half the house probably listening), about sea sponges.
Jayadeep probably knows exactly why I was thinking of sponges (cause of that stupid anatomy test that I totally would have aced if I studied).

Now one thing you need to know is that Jayadeep is an absolute homie, and when I asked him what we were doing in anatomy that day, he told me that we were doing the Porifera (fancy name for sponges) lab. Not only that, but he also warned me that he got a point taken off his lab sheet because he said that sponges were not mostly non-living.

Now another thing you need to know is that sponges are not like coral, even though they look pretty similar. Each sponge is its own organism, not a bunch of tiny organisms living together stacked on top of their dead parents (which is what coral is), so technically the entire thing should be alive, right?

So come 6th hour I asked my anatomy teacher why the answer was non-living, and he said that sponges were mostly non-living because mass-wise, they’re mostly made up of spicules (sponge bones), and spongin, which is like sponge collagen (don’t tell the beauty industry about this stuff, or rubbing it on your skin is gonna become the newest obscure trend).

Think about that for a second. The sponges are considered nonliving because they're made mostly of bones and proteins. You know what else is made mostly of bones and protein?

Yeah, us.

So according to Harvard’s “Database of Useful Biological Numbers” (I’m not making that name up), the average adult’s skeleton accounts for 14-15% of its body weight. Now of course some of that weight comes from the blood marrow types that are present in our bones, but even with that taken into consideration, that’s still a pretty significant number (around 5%*) of us that's just minerals—fancy shaped rocks.

But if we go by the same logic as that Porifera lab question set, a lot of the protein in our body is non-living too and…

2 hours of wasted effort

Ok, pause.

So before we continue, I’m at a cross-roads. Here, you can see that I spent a whole page and a half finding data and trying to calculate how much of our body was made of different “non-living” proteins, like the spongin in sponges.

But for some reason, it didn’t occur to me to just look up “most abundant protein in the human body by mass” until now.

Turns out that someone on Quora asked this question almost 5 years ago, and someone else actually answered.

I know you’re not supposed to trust strangers on the internet, especially when they don’t cite their sources, but honestly, this blog post is just meant to be a thought experiment, so I’m going with it.

When I messaged him for a list of sources or how he got the data, he ghosted me (to be fair, his profile has been inactive since that post). Using the crappy math that I wasted my time doing, the numbers I got do roughly align with the ones “Jeffery Shander”(if that’s his real name) got. The only difference is that he spent the time calculating the weight of the 30 most common proteins in the human body, which is 26 more than the 4 that I tried doing.

The only other info I could find on this mysterious figure was that his name is credited in a study about the “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body” published in the NCBI Journal of Medicine, so I guess he’s a real person (keep his name in mind, it's important).

Now with that out of the way let’s look at his data.

As you can see, AP bio didn't prepare me for this one
also the time in the screenshot is 1:21 pm, on a Saturday

So I highlighted the proteins that I would be looking at in blue (structural proteins), red (blood/fluid proteins), yellow (movement/energy proteins), and green (repair protein) and I didn’t use any of the gray data.

All tallied up, we get 8.913kg ( 7.218 kg blue + 1.285 kg red + .345 kg yellow + .065 kg green) of proteins. Now, Shander extrapolated his data from a 70kg individual, so from that we can say that 12.7%* of us is made of non-living protein, using his data. Keep in mind this isn’t all the protein in our body, which is about 20%, but I’m tired and don’t want to double-check this data, so I’m sticking with this number.

So far we have 5%+12.7%=17.7%, which means that almost 18% of us isn’t alive, right? We'll 18% is a big number, but we're not done yet. I’ve been saving the biggest numbers for last.

Water and Fat

Now, you there’s absolutely no way that you could make the argument that water is alive (unless you’re Paulo Coelho). It’s in our cells, it’s in our organs, it’s in our blood, and it’s 60% of our body weight. That brings our grand total to just shy of 78% of our body being non-living.

But of course, we’ve also got a bunch of fat inside of us (some of us more than others), mainly stored inside of adipose tissue (fat cells). 20-25% of our weight (healthy young adult) is adipose tissue, but using that number would also include some of the protein we counted earlier, so we need to find the weight of just purely the polysaccharides (fats). Now this is where it gets a bit tricky, since the average guy has less fat than the average woman, cause biology. So, for the sake of keeping the estimate conservative, I’m gonna go with the lower number, and go with the 15% that is in the average young male. Now we’re at 92.7%.

So you might think we’re done right now, and that only 7.3% of us is “alive”, but you have to keep in mind  what all the stuff that’s left actually is.

That 7.3% is the free glucose (sugar) that I couldn’t get any good data on; it’s the other trace elements in our body; it’s the fiber; it’s the other macromolecules I forgot; but most importantly, it’s the different proteins that I didn’t account for, only some of which is DNA and RNA.

So here we get into a bit of a philosophical debate. What is alive? How is alive? Am is alive? Was all this math for nothing (Yes.)? I’ve spent these last few (not consecutive) hours trying to calculate these numbers, but as Dr. Ian Macolm said:

(Finding this image led me to go down a mini rabbit hole about whether to credit the actor or screenwriter for a movie quote)

So out of “what’s left”, biologically speaking, the stuff that’s alive is the stuff that can reproduce by itself. So that gets rid of any of the macromolecules like carbs and starches and most of the trace elements in our body (the reason why I didn’t try to subtract those from the total, it’s because certain elements like sulphur are present in certain proteins in small amounts, so that would be like double counting).

Some of the proteins that I didn’t include from Mr. Jeff Shander’s list (CPS1 and ALDOA) (also Shander’s list would be a great bio movie title) are responsible for “fixing up” or “protecting” our genes. But even though that stuff it’s found in the nucleus, it can’t reproduce by itself because—just like any protein—it’s made by the DNA.

Basically, what I’m saying is we can get rid of everything that isn’t DNA or RNA. DNA and RNA can replicate all by themselves under the right conditions. If you’ve ever taken a PCR Covid test, you've seen those conditions: DNA just needs extra “stuff” and extra “energy” to replicate by itself, like the ingredients and heat you need to cook a recipe.

I’m not just counting DNA, because even though our genes are encoded in DNA, there's lots of RNA in our cells that replicate by themselves. For example, our mitochondria (a lot of people don’t know this, but it’s the powerhouse of the cell, just thought I would let you know) used to be their own organisms (Endosymbiotic Theory) and so they replicate themselves using RNA. Also according to the RNA World Hypothesis we learned in AP Bio, life originated as RNA that (ik this is very simplified) replicated itself and folded itself into its own proteins, so rRNA, mRNA and tRNA can replicate themselves (again under the right conditions) (I'm also including them because I'm too lazy to find a study counting just the miRNA in a human cells).

Because we are counting just the DNA and RNA, it means that we can work “backwards”; rather than trying to sum up the percentages of stuff that we can get rid of, we can just try to find the percent that we want to keep.

It also means I wasted my time doing all that math earlier, and that you wasted your time reading/scrolling through it.

So last bit of math I swear (maybe):

So there are 30 trillion cells in the average person (if we’re still going with the 70 kg, relatively young adult male), and there’s 6.51 picograms of DNA in each cell on average (Red Blood Cells lose their nucleus as they mature, but there’s only a few million of them so in comparison so the other numbers here it really doesn’t make a difference). There's also 10 picograms of RNA in each cell . 30 trillion times 16.51*10^-12 is 495.3 grams of "alive" stuff in our body. That's 0.7%, or also just over the weight of a bag of Peanut M&M's.

So yeah, I guess it's pretty spooky that only about 1% of us is really alive. But what's even crazier is that 1% isn't the only thing that is living on us. Only about 43.47%  of the cells on our body are actually "ours" (shout out to my boy Jeff, that paper from earlier came in clutch), the rest are microbes and bacteria.  that means that the 1% of us that is alive isn’t even half of what is living on our bodies.

*these percentages I used were based on (or calculated based on) weight

TL;DR: it’s kind of spooky that only 1% of us is actually “alive”, but the scariest part about this post is all the m*th(matics) I had to do.

ALSO I HATE THSI STUPDI BLOG WEBSITE I WASTED LIKE 3 HOUEES JUST FORMSTTING MY BLOG SO THE FREAKING TEXT WOULDNT GLITFHC OUT AND THERES STILL THIS WEIRD INDENT I CANT GET RID OF WITHOUT HALD OF THE TEXT DISSAPEARING OR WARPING BACK TO THE TOP OF THE PAGE FOR SOME REASON AND ALL THE IMAGES KEEP MESSING UP ALL THE FORMATING AGAIN I SWEAR NEXT TIME IF THIS HAPPENS AGAIN YOU WILL BE SEEING JUST A WALL OF TEXT.

i'm sorry if there's any obvious grammatical errors in this post that i didn't catch, i don't want to look at this ever again