You have approximately forty trillion (40,000,000,000,000) cells that make up your body, most of them smaller
than the finest grain of sand.

The nucleus, or core, of each cell contains all the information necessary to create your entire body with all its differentiated cells. This chemically encoded information, enough to cover over seventy-five thousand pages of written text, is stored in the vast, tiny library known as your DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid), which makes up the genes and chromosomes of your physical structure.

DNA is a huge (macro) molecule encoding the information of who you are—not only everything about your physical body, but information about your emotional, mental, personal and spiritual aspects as well. It consists of fine, hair-like strands in the form of a double helix. It looks like a long, wispy ladder with innumerable rungs, twisted so that the two legs, or strands, spiral around each other, coiled up again and again to fit in the tiniest of spaces. If all of the DNA in any one cell of your body were pulled out of the nucleus and laid out end to end, it would be over six feet long.

Below is a computer generated image of a cross section of DNA as if looking down a tube of it ten base pairs long. It was produced by Robert Langridge of UC, San Francisco, many years ago and is in the public domain.

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