“The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.

“Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.

Every part of this passage is a shockingly accurate description of myself. I felt that I was bad at math and did a biochem degree because it meant I could skip Cal III. Now, I'm a computational biologist and I've mostly made up with math.

The painting is wonderful. Yes, it's a snapshot in time of a dynamic state. All paintings are!

One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise.

Found the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY

> The first time I did these calculations, I felt an intense appreciation for biology. And now, I want everyone else to feel the same. We ought to teach students of biology to think as mathematicians: to carefully quantify biology, to think in absolute units, and to develop a feeling for the organism.

It was interesting to read this article, but I think I would’ve understood a lot more if this entire piece had been (or were) an animated video that described it. Text and a few animations don’t do enough justice for the passion, knowledge and detail that’s in this article, IMO.

Bit nitpicky here but ... he wrote a typical E. coli cell.

Naturally bacteria have different size ranges, depending on many factors - nutrients, temperature, genome and so forth; e. g. look at how huge Thiomargarita namibiensis is.

But the 1 µm as average here given for E. coli, is not correct:

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=117344&...

Length 1.78±0.54 μm

So while +/- at the lower end may be 1.24 µm, the max range here would be 2.42 µm, which is what I had more in mind (e. g. roughly about 2µm). I don't have all of the data to be able to say which is the exact value, but I think the website at bionumbers.hms.harvard.ed is more realistic, so I would say that E. coli's best average is more at 2µm than 1µm.