If we consider the individual elements, a typical 70kg adult body consists of about 46kg (101lbs) of oxygen, 13kg (27lbs) carbon, 7kg (15lbs) hydrogen, 2kg (4lbs) nitrogen and a kilo (2lbs) of calcium, plus another kilo (2lbs) combined of phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium and some trace elements.
In his book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, author Bill Bryson calculates the total cost of these raw materials as over £116,000 ($150,000), but he was using the most expensive, chemically pure form of each element.
If you’re prepared to do the refining yourself, a body would end up costing a lot less.
For example, using 52 litres (11 gallons) of water, which is essentially free, can get you the oxygen and more than enough hydrogen. With a simple electrolysis setup, you could easily then separate this into the required gases.
Similarly, you could get the carbon from good quality charcoal (which is about 70 per cent carbon), for £56 ($75) at the shops. Add 10kg (22lbs) of ammonium sulphate fertiliser to your shopping trolley for £23 ($31) to create the nitrogen and sulphur, and you’re basically there.
All the other elements mostly appear in such small quantities that they’d only add another £10-15 ($13–20) of value, bringing the revised cost estimate to under £100, or $133.
Of course, humans aren’t actually made of elements – they’re made of complex organic molecules, such as proteins and carbohydrates. The cost of synthesising these from raw elements would dwarf the price of the materials themselves.
If you’re not squeamish, a much easier option would be to buy a whole pig (around £200 or $267 at auction) and grind it up into a soup of useful chemical building blocks.
From a molecular standpoint, a pig and a human are essentially the same thing.
Alternatively, you could start with pure energy. Matter and energy are interchangeable, so in theory, we could use a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider to create atoms from pure energy.
To make 70kg (154lbs) of stuff, however, you would need to start with about 10 17 joules of energy. This is equivalent to 1.75 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity – about 70 times as much as the entire world uses in a year.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Phoebe Gray, Southampton) 'How much does the average human body cost?'
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