(Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically-sized human.)Īltogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being.
Perhaps the most respectable and comprehensive attempt of recent years was made by the Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Many authorities (for which possibly read ‘science undergraduates who don’t have a date on a Friday’) have tried at various times, mostly for purposes of amusement, to compute how much it would cost in materials to build a human. The question is: was it true? Are we really worth so little? It was such a spectacularly humbling revelation that it has stayed with me all these years. It may have been $2.97 or $13.50, but it was certainly very little even in 1960s money, and I remember being astounded at the thought that you could make a slouched and pimply thing such as me for practically nothing. Long ago, when I was a junior high school student in America, I remember being taught by a biology teacher that all the chemicals that make up a human body could be bought in a hardware store for $5 or something like that.
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