Introduction: The cost of our body is $1,942.29.

Part 1: The Journey Begins: From the Big Bang to the Rocky Earth

1.
Happy Birthday to All: The Priest Who Discovered the Beginning of Time
2.
“It’s fun”: something you can never see with your eyes.
3.
Harvard's Top Scientist: The Woman Who Changed How We See the Stars
4.
Grateful Disaster: How to Create a World with Gravity and Dust

Part 2 Let there be life!

5.
Messy Snowballs and Space Rocks: The Worst Floods Ever
6.
The most famous experiment: In search of the origin of life molecules
7.
The Great Mystery: The Enigmatic Origin of the First Cell

Part 3: From Sunlight to the Dinner Table

8.
The Essential Light Assembly: The Discovery of Photosynthesis
9.
Luck: From Ocean Debris to Green Plants
10.
Sowing the Seeds: Green Plants and Their Friends Made Us

Part 4: From Atoms to Humans

11.
So much for so little: what you need to eat to live
12.
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Discovery of the Basic Blueprints
13.
Elements and Everything: What Really Makes Up Our Bodies

Conclusion: A really long and strange journey.
Acknowledgements
main
References
Translator's Note
Biographical Index

Happy Birthday to everyone! From the Big Bang to the formation of the Earth

All matter that makes up us and our surroundings, no, all matter in the entire universe, was born on the same day.
Lemaître, a Belgian priest who always wore black, put forward one of the most bizarre ideas in scientific history: that the universe had a beginning.
Einstein, who transformed our understanding of the universe, detested Lemaître's ideas, and British physicist Fred Hoyle derided him as "the Big Bang Man."
However, the cosmic microwave background radiation detected in all directions of the sky provides clear evidence that the universe began with the Big Bang.
The enormous density and temperature of the Big Bang created hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium, but these four elements cannot create humans, who are made up of about 60 different elements.


So where did the rest of the elements come from? The search for the source of the immense energy required to create heavier elements was sparked when Cecilia Payne, "Harvard's greatest scientist," used a photographic plate to capture starlight and determine the ratios of various elements in stars.
It was right inside the star.
Although Fred Hoyle ultimately rejected the Big Bang, he explained where the atoms in our bodies came from by revealing that heavy elements were synthesized in the intense temperatures inside red giant stars and in supernova explosions.


Using pen, ink, and a slide rule, the young Soviet physicist Viktor Safronov calculates that the Sun and its planets were formed when atoms, drifting aimlessly through space, began to rotate under the influence of gravity.
So our atoms finally found a home called Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
But the early Earth was far from a stable home.
The Earth suffered tremendous catastrophes due to constant asteroid collisions, and as a result of those catastrophes, we now have the moon and the Earth's inner core, which is a blessing for us.
And then, 3.8 billion years ago, after 700 million years, the Earth finally became stable.

Life began on Snowball Earth, a journey to discover where life originated.

The most essential thing for life on Earth is water.
The Earth is so covered in water that it can be considered a planet of water rather than land, and 70 percent of our bodies are also made of water.
So where did the water come from? Some of the water flowing through our blood vessels was condensed from the dust that collided with each other and formed the Earth.
Water molecules that traveled a long way aboard comets from the Kuiper Belt between Neptune and Pluto also remain in our bodies.
There is also some water left over from the much more distant Oort cloud, which marks the outer boundary of the solar system, that traveled to Earth over tens of thousands of years.
However, most of the water in our bodies probably arrived on large rocky asteroids that originated near Jupiter.
And between 3.8 and 4.4 billion years ago, between 100 and 700 million years after the Earth was born, waters arriving from such disparate places gathered together to form the vast ocean.


Here we encounter Stanley Miller's organic molecule experiment, one of the most famous experiments in biology.
It's a simple experiment where you recreate the oceans and atmosphere that existed on the early Earth in a flask and then create an electric spark to replace lightning.
As a result of his experiments, Miller obtained an amino acid in just a few days, which was the simplest amino acid found in our bodies.
However, Miller's experimental results showing that organic matter was created in the ocean lost their validity when it was discovered that the Earth's atmosphere differed from Miller's experimental conditions, and research on the origin of organic matter seemed to fall into a labyrinth.
However, the discovery of amino acids identical to those Miller had obtained in his experiments in meteorites gave strength to the speculation that organic matter had flown to Earth from space.


How did life emerge on Earth, a planet rich in organic matter? The lipid-based cell membrane, which separates life from the outside world, naturally formed by attracting water on one side and repelling it on the other.
In other words, “the cell membrane appeared before the cell.” However, the things inside the cell were not created on their own.
Scientists are stuck on the question of which came first, DNA or protein.
But Carl Woods, Leslie Ogel, and Francis Crick each gave the same answer.
The first cells were built around single-stranded RNA, not double-stranded DNA.
So where did this happen? Scientists have long believed that life couldn't exist in the deep sea.
It was thought that life could not survive in a dark place with enormous water pressure, low water temperature, and no sunlight.
But contrary to scientists' expectations, the deep sea they actually observed was teeming with life.
Areas where hydrothermal water erupts in the deep sea are rapidly emerging as potential sites for the origin of life.
In addition, the theory that life originated on Mars has been proposed.
We don't know exactly where life originated, but one thing is certain: it completely transformed our planet.


Scientists who have unraveled the secrets of photosynthesis and the plants that transformed Earth's landscape and shaped us.

Let's follow the amazing journey of plants that transformed Earth into the green planet we know today.
Through photosynthesis, plants convert energy from the sun into carbohydrates we can use, and they absorb carbon dioxide and release it as the oxygen we breathe.
Before we could understand the process of photosynthesis, which is so familiar to us, scientists competed for credit for their discoveries, stayed up all night researching, woke up drunk at dawn, and were arrested as murder suspects, and even lost their lives in laboratory accidents.
Photosynthesis wasn't all good for Earth.
Cyanobacteria released oxygen through photosynthesis and corroded so much iron that traces of it can still be found in ancient rocks today.


As all the iron corroded, the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere increased, killing off life that lacked a protective layer against oxygen.
Moreover, the increased oxygen concentration caused an ice age, freezing the entire planet.
About 2.1 billion years ago, after the end of the Ice Age, a remarkable new life form called the eukaryotic cell emerged on Earth, a leap in complexity far more remarkable than the leap from tricycles to space shuttles.
Microbiologist Lynn Margulis proposed the revolutionary idea that this leap occurred when cells engulfed other cells and formed a symbiotic relationship.
Scientists have also discovered that plants are far more intelligent than we thought, protecting themselves from external attacks and using fungi to efficiently produce nutrients, turning the Earth into a green planet.

Discovering the basic blueprint of humankind, from what comes to what ends up on our tables.

Let's think about our dinner table.
Let's think of food as a molecule made up of atoms simply coming together.
Now we know where those atoms come from, how they are made, and how they end up on our plates.
But once we eat, how do the molecules in our food become living beings? What are the substances we absolutely need to build our bodies? Justus von Liebig, a German scientific revolutionary, discovered that we fundamentally need carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.


In addition to these three, it was only after countless people lost their lives that we learned that various vitamins and minerals are absolutely necessary, and that deficiencies can cause scurvy and beriberi.
Next, it's time to meet DNA, which explains how these essential nutrients become part of our bodies.
Scientists knew that DNA was what gave the cells instructions, but they didn't know how DNA gave those instructions.
James Watson and Francis Crick discovered that DNA is a double helix structure made up of four small bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine.
Its structure allows us to understand how genes are replicated and passed on, and how mutations occur. DNA tells our cells how food can be transformed into our bodies.


Finally, we take a closer look inside cells, the smallest units of our bodies, to uncover how atoms could leap into life.
The inside of a cell is not a tranquil lake, but is filled with machines that move materials, like a construction site, such as ATP synthase, which produces energy at incredible speed, and the sodium-potassium pump, which transmits nerve signals. This book follows the long and strange journey of atoms from the moment of all matter's birth through space and stars to Earth, where they become us.
By following the great scientists who have unraveled the secrets of atoms and life and the process of their astonishing discoveries, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the scientific knowledge we now know, interspersed with entertaining anecdotes.