The average protein is about 300 amino acids in length—more precisely, 267 for bacterial and 361 for eukaryotic proteins.19 These chains of amino acids can be ordered in 20300 different ways, a figure we can also represent as 10390. That’s a 1 followed by 390 zeroes. Pause for a moment to grasp how big that number is. A single water droplet of average size contains some five sextillion atoms (5.01 x 1021). There are an estimated 1082 atoms in the visible universe, a universe containing more than 100 billion galaxies; and galaxies have, on average, about 100 billion stars. And yet the even
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