The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

If a single cell’s DNA could be stretched out straight, like a wire, it would measure six and a half feet. And if you could do that for every cell in the human body and laid all of that DNA end to end, it would stretch from the Earth to the sun and back again more than sixty times. String together all the DNA in every human being on the planet, and it would reach the Andromeda galaxy and back nearly two and half times.