Question: What made you want to become a physiologist? What re cell types? How many cell types are there in the human body?

Michael Taggart answered on 14 Jun 2011:

I’ve always been curious about why things are they way they are and how could one find answers to that question. I guess in my teens bieng an active runner was what tunnelled my interest towards physiology which is, really, the study of life of the body. Our human body is made up of individual cells that live in solutions (saliva, blood etc) or in structures known as tissues and organs. These are anything from blood vessels, the heeart, the brain, the stomach, toes, fingers, nails, hair etc. All these and more tissues and organs are made of cells somehow meshed together. You’ll know that a hair you pluck from your head isn’t the same thing as a toe nail or an eye or ear. But they are each tissues made up of cells. The cells, however, are slightly different – they have been arranged in a particular way in order to perform the special functions that we require of a hair versus an eye versus a toe nail. They are arranged like this by expressing different amounts, or different sorts, of genes and proteins within the cells. So, when we say a cell type it is meant to indicate that it has a special function in a tissue or organ. There are millions upon millions of cells in the body but ‘only’ about a couple of hundred different types of cells.