During a sick call or an annual check-up, one of the first measurements collected by the doctor is the patient’s body temperature. Courtesy of Roy Perry on Wikimedia Commons. When you go to the doctor, the first measurement taken—whether it’s
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons In the last century, American life expectancy has more than doubled from forty-seven years in 1900 to seventy-eight in 2019. With antibiotics and vaccines, child mortality rates have sharply dropped alongside mortality rates at every
You share 99.9 percent of your genetic material with the person sitting next to you. This genetic material, or DNA, encodes the proteins your body produces and, by extension, all of your traits. However, despite your genetic similarity, your neighbor
In the average adult human, half a pound of proteins is turned over daily–destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. Among the many biological processes that occupy an organism throughout its lifetime, protein production ranks among the most intensive. Most forms of
Everyone generates cancerous cells. The human body is made up of more than a hundred million cells that may mutate during the process of division to grow uncontrollably—i.e. become cancerous. However, the human immune system has built-in mechanisms that detect
