Disalin oleh Didiek S. Hargono

DOA SEORANG TENTARA PEJUANG UNTUK ANAKNYA

(A SOLDIER PRAYER FOR HIS SON)

Jenderal Douglas Mac Arthur

Tuhanku.........................

Aku mohon agar putraku jangan dipimpin di atas jalan yang mudah dan lunak,

tetapi pimpinlah di bawah tekanan dan desakan, kesulitan, dan tantangan

Tuhanku .........................

Bentuklah putraku supaya teguh berdiri di atas badai

Bentuklah putraku menjadi manusia yang cukup kuat untuk mengetahui manakala dia lemah dan berani menghadapi dirinya manakala dia takut....

Manusia yang bangga dan teguh dalam kekalahannya, jujur dan rendah hati serta berbudi halus dalam kemenangan.

Bentuklah putraku agar hasratnya tidak pernah mati

Putraku yang mengetahui Engkau dan insyaf bahwa mengenal dirinya sendiri adalah landasan pengetahuan.

Tuhanku...........................

Bentuklah putraku menjadi manusia yang hatinya jernih, serta cita-citanya tinggi.

Putra yang sanggup memimpin dirinya sendiri, sebelum berhasrat memimpin orang lain.

Putra yang menjangkau hari depan namun tidak pernah melupakan masa lampau

Dan setelah ini semua menjadi miliknya....

Aku mohon juga agar putraku diberikan perasaan jenaka...

Berilah kerendahan hati agar dia tetap sederhana dan menjunjung tinggi keagungan yang hakiki, pikiran yang cerah dan terbuka bagi sumber kearifan, kelembutan dan juga kekuatan....

Dengan demikian aku ayahnya akan memberanikan diri berbisik : "Hidupku tidak sia-sia....."

Since we have about 200 trillion cells and each one performs millions of chemical reactions, the total number of chemical reactions in the human body is too huge to predict with any certainty.

Update

I'm a chiropractic student and watched a video earlier today that indicated the human body undergoes about 400 billion chemical reactions per second every second of your life.

Another Possible Answer

The estimate of cells in the human body ranges from 100-200 trillion. So if every cell did at least one chemical reaction per second, than the number of reactions must truly be higher than 400 billion. Cells perform thousands, if not millions of chemical reactions in every cell every second. I agree with the first answer that the complexity and the total number is too huge to predict or even imagine.

If we have 100-200 trillion cells in our bodies, than we have a thousand more times cells in our bodies as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If we take one step forward and ask how many atoms do we have in our bodies, that number is also about a thousand more galaxies that we know to exist in the universe.

Perhaps it is poetic to say that we are truly made of stardust, and each one of us is the product of several second generation stars that threw up enough dust into space to ultimately congeal into our solar system, with our sun as the center, and this wet rocky planet we all call home, Earth, the third rock from the sun.

Another Update

Quite unlikely that *every* cell in our body performs a chemical reaction every second. Consider for instance, that while 60% of our total volume of blood is found in the veins, only 5% is found in the capillaries where nutrient and waste products are exchanged. Considering keratinized epithelial cells, most apical layers are going to be dead so they aren't going to be reacting much and that's a pretty big part of the largest organ in our body, the skin. Assuming a person has decent amounts of calcium then osteoblast and osteclast should be in a reasonable state of homeostasis. Some cardiac tissue does have fast calcium channels but those are only open for a few 10,000ths of a second over the course of a cardiac cycle which is about 0.83 seconds on average (Guyton's). You'll find a vast number of muscles along the spinal column but the greatest numbers of muscles for proprioception are found along the vertebral columns and as such their main function is to provide an awareness of our spatial orientation.

The crux of this info comes from biochemistry, physiology and neuroanatomy and all three of my teachers for those classes come from some pretty well respected med schools (Wash U & SLU) - I'm checking the "bible" of physiology - i.e., Guytons Textbook of Medical Physiology and that book does cite 100 trillion for the total number of cells in the entire body. About 25 trillion of those are red blood cells. Of course, rbc's lack mitochondrians so metabolic pathways such as the TCA cycle would be excluded from their repertoire of activity.

Even things like a triacylglyceride (TAG) say a VLDL will have a CII polypeptide that's looking for a receptor (which it should find in an adipocyte) but after that's it's an IDL with a B100 polypeptide and that's only going to find a receptor at the liver and it does take times for various lipoproteins to circulate throughout the system.