It turns out this is a major synthetic effort on the part of most cells. Cells, like our own, have between 5 and 10 million ribosomes in the cytoplasm. So it’s an enormous amount of biomass in the cytoplasm whose sole function is to synthesize proteins. As we will learn also, proteins that are synthesized by the ribosomes don’t sit around forever. Some proteins have long lives. Some proteins have lifetimes of 15 minutes before they’re degraded, before they’re turned over.