A simple question deserves a simple answer. How many cells are in your body?

Unfortunately, your cells cant fill out census forms, so they cant tell you themselves.
And while its easy enough to look through a microscope and count off certain types
of cells, this method isnt practical either. Some types of cells are easy to spot, while
otherssuch as tangled neuronsweave 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 youd encounter
along the way to counting all the cells in your bodyfor example, chopping your own
body up into tiny patches for microscopic viewing.
For now, the best we can hope for is a study published recenty in Annals of Human
Biology, entitled, with admirable clarity, An Estimation of the Number of Cells in the
Human Body.

The authorsa team of scientists from Italy, Greece, and Spainadmit that theyre
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 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 cant 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, its 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 mans 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 youll find that the red blood cells are packed
tight. If you used their density to estimate the cells in a human body, youd come to a
staggering 724 trillion cells. Skin cells, on the other hand, are so sparse that theyd
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 by organs and cell types. (They didnt try counting up all

the microbes that also call our body home, sticking only to human cells.) Theyve
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 withdrumroll37.2 trillion
cells.
This is not a final number, but its a very good start. While its true that people may
vary in sizeand thus vary in their number of cellsadult humans dont 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 collaborationperhaps through an online database
assembled by many experts on many different body partsto zero in on a better
estimate.
Curiosity is justification enough to ponder how many cells the human body contains,
but there can also be scientific benefits to pinning down the number too. Scientists are
learning about the human body by building sophisticated computer models of lungs
and hearts and other organs. If these models have ten times too many cells as real
organs do, their results may veer wildly off the mark.
The number of cells in an organ also has bearing on some medical conditions. The
authors of the new study find that a healthy liver has 240 billion cells in it, for
example, but some studies on cirrhosis have found the disease organ have as few as
172 billion.
Perhaps most importantly, the very fact that some 34 trillion cells can cooperate for
decades, giving rise to a single human body instead of a chaotic war of selfish
microbes, is amazing. The evolution of even a basic level of multicellularity is
remarkable enough. But our ancestors went way beyond a simple sponge-like
anatomy, evolving a vast collective made of many different types. To understand that
collective on a deep level, we need to know how big it really is.