Here we refer to life itself. The wonders of the atom and the glory of the galaxies are but drab Tinkertoys when compared to the miracle of living organisms.

A. The smallest insect is made up of millions of living cells. There are some 75 trillion such cells in the average human body. Every one of those individual cells is unbelievably complex. It has been demonstrated that the simplest living cell is vastly more complicated than the most sophisticated giant computer.

B. Each cell is a world brimming with as many as 200 trillion tiny groups of atoms called protein molecules. It is a microuniverse in itself.

C. The largest molecule is called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The DNA strand carries the hereditary information from the parent to the offspring in all living things. It contains the genetic code and determines whether you will turn out to be a man, mushroom, dandelion, or dinosaur.

D. The DNA strand in a single cell measures six feet in length. If all of the DNA strands in the body were bunched up, they could fit into a box the size of an ice cube. But if unwound and joined together, the strand would stretch from the earth to the sun and back more than 400 times.

E. Each of the 75 trillion cells in a human body contains the same full DNA code. Thus, a cell in the little toe has all the DNA data necessary to make another complete and physically-identical human being.

F. If the coded DNA instructions of a single human cell were put into English, they would fill a 1,000–volume encyclopedia.

G. During cell division, two strands of DNA (called the double helix) that have been wrapped around each other in ladder-like fashion separate to replicate the DNA strand for the new cell. It is believed that the rotation during the unwinding occurs at the rate of more than 75 turns per second. This would be somewhat like untangling thousands of feet of rope in a split second. After the double helix is separated, it then duplicates itself to provide DNA for the new cell. This duplication is so accurate that it would correspond to a rate of error of less than one letter in an entire set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

H. A human cell in a laboratory, free from bodily influence, may divide some fifty times before dying. If all of our cells divided that often, we would eventually reach a weight of more than 80 trillion tons.