Book Review: Power, Sex, Suicide
Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school. That they are an organelle inside your cells. That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen. That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die. However, they’re a lot more than that too. Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates. That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane. Let’s say you’re a mitochondria or a bacteria that lives off of