• Question: In your oppinion what's the most important part of the human body.

    Asked by Naomi845 to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 19 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      I think the whole body is important. I don’t think I would like to try to live without any bit of it – it’s all there for a reason! We need a skeleton otherwise we’d just be a blob of muscle on the floor so I guess that’s pretty important. I need a blood system (heart, lungs, blood vessels) to get oxygen and fuel around my body. I need eyesight, touch and hearing to interact with the world. I need a digestive system to turn yummy food into energy for my brain. I need a brain to think, plan what I’m going to eat, etc etc. I don’t really think there’s one part that’s more important than the others!

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      The human body is an integrated system: it’s designed to work as a whole, not as a series of disconnected bits. There are lots of parts of your body that are essential to your remaining alive: your liver may not be as obviously glamorous as your heart or your brain, but just try doing without it. It’s easier to list the bits you don’t need, such as your appendix, which as far as I know is good only for getting infected and causing you to get very sick. You can live without part of your intestine, although not the whole lot, and several generations of careless or unfortunate mountaineers and polar explorers have demonstrated that losing the odd finger or toe is not a problem, though you wouldn’t want to overdo it. You can manage on one kidney, which is why people sometimes donate one to a relative suffering from kidney failure – but you can’t live without both, so which are you going to say is more important? [I have no idea how surgeons decide which one to remove from volunteer donors – do they toss a coin?]

      So, I don’t really think this is a very sensible question. Whichever part of your body you picked would not survive on its own, and probably wouldn’t want to. The part of the human body that’s most distinctive to humans is the brain, but the brain relies on most of the rest of the body to keep it going. Even if it didn’t, would you want to be a disembodied brain in a jar?

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