A review of “The Secret Body” by Daniel M Davis (2021)

There is a certain irony that, a year and a half into the global pandemic when I finally fell foul of the coronavirus and had to self-isolate, top of my reading list was this book with the sub-title “How the new science of the human body is changing the way we live”. Although the author is professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, I had thought this was a popular science book, but it’s hard going for someone (like me) who has never had any lesson in biology and the 538 endnotes are very much for medical readers. 

What any reader cannot fail to take away, however, is the conclusion that “we are at the cusp of a revolutionary time in virtually every aspect of human biology”. It is striking how so many of the discoveries described came from collaboration between scientists from different disciplines and how frequently the spark was a chance conversation at a conference (you don’t get this from virtual events).

The six chapters look respectively at the individual cell, the embryo, the body’s organs and systems, the brain, the microbiome, and the genome. Above all, what we learn is that everything is immeasurably more complicated than was once thought.

Take the brain. A human brain is made up of 86 billion neurons. Those neurons are connected by around 100 trillion synapses, each allowing messages to move from one cell to another. Neurons are not even the most common type of brain cell which are in fact glial cells which do all sorts of things including forming and adapting neural connections. There are around 100 billion glial cells. 

I find these figures mind-boggling. Yet there are scientists trying to create a wiring map for the brain that shows which neurons are connected to which other neurons. A new word has been made up for such a concept – one of many new words to me in this fascinating book: the connectome. Remember where you heard it first.


 




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