A narrated, interactive tour of the cell for people who write code: nine chapters, about 44 minutes. Press play and listen, or stop anywhere and poke at the scene.
Not medical advice
This is for learning. The chapter on ITP explains how the disease works in general; for decisions about your own health, talk to a clinician.
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Listen offline
The whole narration is also one MP3 with chapter markers (44 minutes, 26 MB), without the lines that only make sense on screen: the-wetware-manual.mp3.
How it was made
The script, animations and code were written with Claude (Anthropic) and fact-checked against the sources below. The narration is the “George” voice from ElevenLabs. Typefaces: Atkinson Hyperlegible Next and Mono (Braille Institute) and Newsreader (Production Type), under the SIL Open Font License.
Sources
Textbooks and databases for the basics, and papers for the specific numbers and claims.
- Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell (NCBI Bookshelf)
- Milo & Phillips, Cell Biology by the Numbers
- BioNumbers database
- Sender, Fuchs & Milo 2016, PLoS Biology: how many cells are in a body
- Sender & Milo 2021, Nature Medicine: how many cells the body replaces
- GENCODE: current human gene counts
- Wardemann et al. 2003, Science: self-reactive antibodies in new B cells
- Roark et al. 2002, Blood: where ITP autoantibodies come from
- Li et al. 2015, Nature Communications: a second way platelets are cleared in ITP
- Todd et al. 2009, J. Exp. Med.: XBP1 and antibody secretion
- Landsverk et al. 2017, J. Exp. Med.: plasma cells that last for decades
- Sanofi 2025: US approval of rilzabrutinib for ITP
- Jónsson et al. 2017, Nature: new mutations per generation
- Abascal et al. 2021, Nature: mutation rates in the body’s tissues
- Luquette et al. 2022, Nature Genetics: mutations building up in neurons
- Cheng et al. 2009, PLoS Genetics: recombination in human eggs
- Rands et al. 2014, PLoS Genetics: how much of the genome is constrained
- Moody et al. 2024, Nature Ecology & Evolution: the age of the last common ancestor