Is this a myth?
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 | Filed under Nerdy Delights
I read this article in which a scientist claims that only 10% of the cells in our body are human. The rest are supposedly bacteria, fungi, and other wee colonizers, many of which live in some sort of symbiosis with us.
This sounds wrong to me. I’m willing to believe that we carry a significant load of these micro-critters. But that they make up 90% of us just doesn’t sound possible.
Any scientists out there care to elaborate?
October 8th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I know wikipedia is wikipedia but it’s sometimes helpful. I think the article just stated it poorly.
“There are approximately ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells in the human body, with large numbers of bacteria on the skin and in the digestive tract.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
October 8th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
I found another scientist who says yes:
Jeffrey I. Gordon at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis says “based on cell number, each of us is 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human.” (http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/winter2005/bacteria/bacteria2.html)
The only person I know who does biological research mostly deals with rat brains. I wish I knew more scientists.
October 8th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
What they mean is that when you look at all the cells inside and outside of the human body, bacteria outnumbers human cells 10 to 1 or something like that. There’s a ton of bacteria in the digestive tract and on the skin.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Yeah, I understood what they were saying. But even so, a 90-10 split still sounded implausible to me–until I did some research into relative size, and realized that bacteria are much smaller than I had thought, and much smaller relative to human cells than I had thought. So it’s now more plausible to me.