You and your loved ones may know that, but now a Yale University biophysicist has determined scientifically that a pound of human flesh is worth about $111,475 and a whole body around $6 million. And those prices only cover raw materials, the hormones, proteins, enzymes, RNA, DNA, amino acids, and other complex biochemicals that are the stuff of life, Dr. Harold J. Morowitz says.
Fashioning the $6 million chemical shopping list into human cells might cost $6,000,000,000,000 [six thousand trillion dollars], Morowitz estimates assembling the resulting heap of cells into tissue, the tissue into organs, and the organs into a warm body might drain all the treasuries of the world, with no guarantee of success, Morowitz concluded.
Morowitz described his human value analysis in a column he writes for Hospital Practice magazine. His calculations, he said, lead “suddenly and sharply [to] the realization that each human being is priceless.”
Morowitz was prompted to do the calculations by the popular saying that the materials which make up the average human body are worth only 97 cents. This piddling sum only reflects the market value of basic atomic elements—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, calcium, sodium—found in the molecules of the average body. A more appropriate measure, Morowitz thought, would be the retail cost of complete human biochemicals, most of which can be purchased from chemical specialty supply firms, so he began checking catalogues.
The prices ranged from a modest $2.95 a gram for hemoglobin [the blood’s oxygen-carrying substance] to $17,500,000 a gram for prolactic, a hormone that stimulates and helps regulate milk production by the female breasts. Other items in a do-it-yourself human kit would include DNA, at $768 a gram, crystalline insulin for $47.50 a gram, alkaline phosphatase at $225 a gram, and acetate kinase for $8,860 a gram, Morowitz found.
“The real shocker came when I got to follicle-stimulating hormone at $4,800,000 a gram—clearly outside the reach of anything Tiffany’s could offer,” he said. “I’m going to suggest it as a gift for people who have everything. For the really wealthy, there is prolactin at $175,000,000 a gram, street price.”
Collagen, a fibrous protein “glue” that holds the body together, was a relative bargain at $15 a gram.
Using the best scientific estimate of the amount of each biochemical in an average human body, Morowitz calculated that human tissue is worth $245.54 per gram dry weight, based on the catalogue prices. He computed his own 168-pound body weight in grams, subtracted the 68 percent that is water, and multiplied by $245.54.
“The number literally jumped out at me—$6,000,015.44—I was a Six Million Dollar Man, no doubt about it, and really an enormous upgrade to my ego after the 97 cent evaluation,” Morowitz quipped.
From there Morowitz went on to calculate that assembly costs for a human body indeed are incalculable. Chiropractors have been saying this since D.D. Palmer delivered the first adjustment in 1895!! You are priceless—your body is a true miracle…..treat it that way!!!
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