• Question: I know there is 6ft of dna in each cell of the human body, if you got all the dna and stretched it out how far would it go?, can you give an example of the distance?

    Asked by littleewok to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      @littleewok This is the sort of question that http://www.Yourgenome.org can answer. Have a look….

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Well, if you assume that we have about 40 trillion cells in our bodies, then its about 240 trillion feet, or 12 trillion meters. The distance to the sun is about 150 billion meters, so the DNA could stretch from here to the sun almost 100 times!

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      A typical adult contains 15 trillion cells (here’s a neat article on how they calculated that: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/23/how-many-cells-are-in-your-body/) so that would be 15 trillion x 6 ft, which is 90 trillion feet or 30.6 trillion metres. It is about 150 billion metres to the sun and a billion goes into a trillion 1000 times, so this works out at about 100 times the distance to the sun and back–wow!

      *I’ve never worked this out before-this really is mindbogglingly big, isn’t it?!

Comments

  • Photo: littleewok

    littleewok commented on :

    Sweet
    Its an incredible amount
    Although I did want a more presise than about or almost

    • Photo: Jane

      Jane commented on :

      It’s hard to calculate this very precisely, because different humans have different numbers of cells and thus different amounts of DNA. Also, when we’re talking about such big numbers, we don’t need to be so precise, because the answer is effectively the same, even if it changes by what sounds like a lot.