What We Can Learn from Mitochondria – Experimental Frontiers, with Josh Mitteldorf

About a billion years ago, there was a very powerful bacterium, which we'll call Mitey, that was an expert in redox chemistry. This is the same chemistry that powers batteries, and it consumes far more energy than the organic chemistry of life that existed before. Mitey was a parasite that used its high-powered chemistry to kill its host. And who were its hosts? The only other life forms at that time were single-celled creatures called archaea. Its host was named Archie.

Well, it wasn't long (just a few million years) before Mitey learned the lesson all parasites learn. If you kill your host, there's nothing left to steal. Mitey learned to keep her high-powered toxins to herself, to live and let live. She made her home inside Archie. She reproduced and had babies that also lived inside Archie. When Archie split in two to generate little Archellas, some of the Mitellas went with each half.

And so, Mitella's fate became tied to Archella's. And after a few million years, some Mitellas had another idea. If they helped their host Archella, Archella would do better and Mitella would have more. living spaceA win-win situation.

How to help Archella? Mitella had one thing in abundance: electrochemical energy. Mitella donated some of his prodigious energy to Archella, who learned to use it. The combination was unstoppable, and the rest is history. Every plant and animal in the world is descended from Archie and Mitey. Every cell in your body is filled with tiny Mitellas, and the cells are completely dependent on them for the energy that fuels their metabolism.

Today we call them mitochondriaThere are hundreds of them in every cell, thousands in muscle and nerve cells that need more energy. Mitochondria have accomplished far more than any amount available when they were parasites.

Lynn Margulis coined the word endosymbiosis for a symbiotic relationship inside a single cell. She told this story in 1966 when she was still a graduate student, and about 20 journals refused to publish her theory. Too radical. I finally made it with the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and today his theory is biology textbooktoo common to be associated with its name or its history.

Today, humans are a parasite on the planet, poisoning entire ecosystems and treating nature as a resource to be exploited. Parasitism is the first step towards symbiosis. We are beginning to learn from the damage we have caused, which is turning against us and degrading our comfortable lifestyles. Some of us are poisoned by the same chemistry that is poisoning so many life forms on our beautiful planet. We should not be surprised.

We have a militant (albeit paralyzed) environmental movement that is fighting against the capitalist mentality and hoping to curb some of our most destructive behavior.

Reducing poisoning and habitat destruction is our current struggle. It is the limit of our vision, but it is not our destiny. Our destiny is to learn from mitochondria.

There is some evidence—and I choose to believe it—that the reason why America before Columbus The fact that early peoples were home to the richest ecosystems in the world was not because they were too stupid to exploit the biosphere the way people in Europe and Asia did at the time. I prefer to believe that the ethos of early peoples was different. They did not see their role as parasites on the land, but as symbionts. They knew how to use fire to maintain vast grasslands for herds of bison and elk. They knew how to plant gardens with adjacent flowers and vegetables that helped each other grow. They planned seven generations in advance and planted their forests with fruits and nuts in the right combinations, mixed with other deciduous and evergreen trees to create a vibrant and healthy forest. The forests they planted were richer and more productive than any in Europe or Asia, and I prefer to believe that this was the product of a wisdom tradition.

So this It will be our destiny. We will combine the ethos of the First Peoples with the methods of modern science. Under the guidance of Future Humans, Gaia will thrive, diversify, and flourish as never before. Earth will be a richer and more beautiful environment than anything we can imagine, and far more productive for human needs than our monoculture technology, fertilizers, and toxins could ever achieve.

We will unite our destiny with Gaea's and together we will flourish beyond our wildest dreams. This is my prayer.

Note: Sometimes a cell commits suicide, destroying itself for the sake of the larger organism. In our bodies, cells do this all the time when internal signals detect that they have become cancerous or when they are infected with a virus. The process of cell suicide is called apoptosis, And to this day, the destruction is carried out by mitochondria, not on their own initiative, but following orders from the cell nucleus. The mechanism involves high-energy redox chemistry (ROS), which recalls the origin of mitochondria a billion years ago.