Henry's fantastic facts
Your body is made up of more than a 1000 billion cells. These all came from a single fertilised egg cell. The longest living cells in the body are brain cells which can live an entire lifetime.
Each cell stores information a bit like a computer, on a molecule called DNA. DNA is a very long molecule – if you stretched out all the DNA in your body and joined it together, it would reach to the moon and back eight times.
- If all the information on our DNA was printed in small type, it would fill a thousand thick telephone directories.
- Marie Curie scientists need to use very powerful microscopes to be able to see it.
- Messages on our DNA mean that cells inside our bodies are constantly chatting to one another.
Neighbouring cells say things to each other like “Grow a bit more” and equally importantly, “Stop growing”.
- Marie curie scientists are studying the difference between some of these messages in normal cells and cancer cells.
- Marie Curie Scientists are working to understand more about the mistakes made in this information in cancer cells.
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