The Six Million Dollar Man

 - Harold J. Morowitz (1927- )

Once, the writer received a birthday card from his daughter and son-in-law. The card contained a caption which said the materials that make up human body are only worth ninety-seven cents. He wanted to check whether the human body was so cheap or not. He took a price list from a bio-chemical company and started counting the price of human body.

After calculating every element of human body, Morowitz concluded that the average value of a gram dry weight of human being would be 245.54 dollars. He found his body weight was 76,364 grams. He cut 68% of his body weight for water. Then, he found the figure to be $6,000,015.44 as his body price. He was a six million dollar man. It was really an enormous amount in comparison to ninety-seven cents.

He wanted to find a balanced middle figure between the two. Keeping in his mind that information is more expensive than matter, he restarted counting the price. If the things were more complex and more informative, the prices would be higher. His six million dollar estimate seemed much too low. This was only the price of separated natural elements. If they had to be synthesized again, his body would cost six hundred millions or six billion dollars. Only insulin and ribonuclease have been successfully synthesized so far. But even after buying all the smaller parts, a human being would not have been bought as a whole.

The modern science has not been able to assemble the molecules into organelles. The price of human body in terms of synthesized cellular substructures becomes six hundred billion or six trillion dollars. Even at this stage, it cannot make love, complain, and do all those other things that constitute our humanity. When we further try to assemble organelles into cells, the cost becomes very high. It cannot be less than six thousand trillion dollars.

We cannot imagine of assembling the cells into tissues, tissues into organs, and organs into a person. It is staggeringly difficult. We suddenly realize that each human being is priceless. The scientific reasons are clear. As we go higher than the molecular level, we go beyond science. It might lead us to the conclusion that the human body is only the instrument for the precious human soul.