The Incredible Shrinking Man

Adult size isn’t just determined by how fast we grow. It depends also, and perhaps foremost, on how and when this growth stops. Somatic growth results from both cell proliferation (hyperplasia) and cell enlargement (hypertrophy). In mammals, somatic growth is rapid in embryonic and early postnatal life but decelerates dramatically with age, declining toward zero as [...]

Palaeontologists studying fossilised horses have found a direct link between the size of mammals and climate change. According to Dr. Jonathan Bloch, curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History, as temperatures go up size goes down, and vice versa. Bloch: ‘Horses started out small 56 million years ago, about the size of a small dog. What’s [...]

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a neurological condition affecting human visual perception, in which objects within an affected section of the visual field appear larger (macropsia) or smaller (micropsia) than normal, causing the subject to feel smaller (or larger) than they actually are. In Lewis Carroll’s famous 19th century novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the title [...]

One of the most promising consequences of downsizing the human species is the change in space and time it’ll take to grow food. In several research installations at Food Forward (a look into the future of food) The Incredible Shrinking Man investigates new possibilities. Like the potential for a specific type of fish to feed us [...]

Pygmies display a remarkable and inspiring resistance to growth hormone (GH). Even if large quantities of GH are administered to them, they simply ignore it and retain their normal size of less than 150cm. Such genetic resistance represents the kind of evolutionary intelligence we would like to find more of. In every human being growth hormones [...]

Tall people need more resources than short people. That’s why it’s rather alarming that the human species continues to grow taller. In fact our increasing height puts more pressure on the ecosystem services than the total population growth. If people become 20% taller this creates over 70% more pressure whereas a 20% population growth would mean 20% [...]

Rescaling something always has effect. It makes us notice things. It changes the way we perceive, and it reinstates a certain autonomy of the object. But what happens if the rescaled object is the human body? How would we perceive reality if everything around us increased in size because we got smaller?
The only people to [...]

People living in remote villages in Ecuador have a genetic mutation that may just hold the key to shrinking mankind. The villagers have a rare condition known as Laron syndrome. They are generally less than three and a half feet tall, they are proportional, and interestingly, they are also almost free of cancer and diabetes.
The Laron People (we prefer [...]

Body height is a classic polygenic trait. About 80% to 90% of your height is inherited and 10% to 20% owed to environmental factors, of which nutrition is the most important. Of those nutrients perhaps milk is the one associated most with increased human height. It contains calories, protein, vitamin D, calcium and bioactive components such [...]

A study of 1,3 million women published in The Lancet Oncology finds that tall people are more likely to develop cancer. The researchers looked at the incidence of 17 cancer types, from breast cancer to leukemia, in a long-term health study across socio-economic levels. Cancer risk rose 16% with every added 10 centimeters (4 inches) [...]