I have somewhere 10 trillion cells in my body. So do you. It's one of the reasons we have so much fun together. Similarly, we each dedicate somewhere on the order of fifty billion of these cells to the two bean-shaped organs we know as our kidneys. Each kidney is made up of about one million impossibly small structures called nephrons that do its dirty work. Next time you have a bowl of spaghetti for dinner, look down at your plate -- that's about the shape of an individual nephron. Only a nephron isn't much like the bowl of spaghetti that you or I would eat. It's a tangled mess worthy of the world's most graceful ballerina or maybe its most melodic composer. It's totally beautiful.

In any case, this is the part where Frank Gehry eats his heart out: these graceful little string-tangles, each of which makes up less than one half of one millionth of one percent of your body weight, are total workhorses. They are rugged. So rugged that they pluck the garbage from 45 gallons of blood every day. 45 gallons. Picture 90 cartons of milk. That's how much 45 gallons is. If you were to take all that milk, shoot it through a coffee filter with a fire hose, catch all the liquid coming out the other side, and give back just the right mix of essential nutrients, proteins, and water, you would have done the job of your kidney.

Add up all the Guggenheims in the world, and they wouldn't even hold a candle to one of your kidneys. Form and function, beauty and meaning -- these are nice ideas when applied to the built environment, but they are real things when applied to your middle back. "Thy life's a miracle," said Shakespeare in King Lear, just as the Earl of Gloucester reconsidered his attempted suicide. Having lost his land and his belongings, the Earl realized that he is still alive and, as such, brimming with wealth. Kidneys possess an entirely unappreciated kind of richness. Our nephrons undoubtedly do some of the best work in the business, all the while relying solely on minerals, amino acids, lipids and the laws of diffusion, without a word about supply and demand or cost/benefit ratio. They are a treasure, and the intricate beauty of their mechanism is the form of coinage through which they transact their business.

The inner workings of the kidneys are nearly as intertwined and complicated as their anatomical description. There are actually two different structures within your kidney called "convoluted tubules." As faithful scientists, we are supposed to believe that evolution is responsible for all this, that a fickle and blind accident of fortune produced the glomerular capilliaries, Bowman's capsule, and the loops of Henle. What? Loops of Henle don't even do anything really. They're a meander in a stream or a bump in the road, just there to make navigation a little more difficult. Evolution with an eye cast toward grace, maybe that I can believe. Or natural selection with the dice weighted in favor of beauty, that's within the realm of possibility. I guess that's just the most amazing thing about the world, though: it operates just this side of chance.

But this really is, in its own way, total lunacy. Even two hundred years ago, if you tried to tell anyone that there was a million of anything inside his kidneys, you'd have been locked up. Or worse yet, if your job was to create filtration systems and you dropped the blueprints for a kidney on your boss's desk, you'd at the very least be asked to take some time off and get your head on straight. There's this part in the Koran where Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them all in jest?" Well, at times like these...

This business of the ten trillion cells and the two million nephrons and the forty-five gallons blows my mind. I often recount facts like this to people, not in hopes of making idle chatter or engaging in a contest of random knowledge, but in hopes of changing their lives. It seldom if ever works. But really, the world is a fundamentally different place when you know that nephrons exist.

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