“The humbling journey I’ve been on is to recognize as a doctor, and perhaps as a human, is we are barely human. When it comes down to the sheer number of non-human cells we carry within us–that we are completely dependent on–we are just a fraction human. To give you a sense of the numbers we have somewhere around 50 trillion human cells. That sounds like a massive number, it’s one of the few numbers you’ll hear that are larger than our national debt. It turns out that we have somewhere around one and a half quadrillion bacteria, and probably ten times that in fungi. And so we have fourteen quadrillion microbiome elements within our body.” -Zach Bush, MD
We are barely human
Published
Breathings 