Power, Sex, Suicide

So this months book for book club was called Power, Sex and Suicide, by Nick Lane. Despite the fact that it sounds like a cliche romance novel, it's topic was actually mitochondria, and everything you ever did (and did not) want to know about them.
I have to say it was a fascinating book, and totally worth the time I spent trudging through the technical biology review that comprised the first few chapters.
Biology is so....freaking amazing. And the way all of it fits together and works and reproduces is almost hard to believe. I feel like saying it's perfect, and in a philosophical sense I guess I do mean that. But from a technical standpoint biology is not perfect, it's only as good as it has to be to get by and produce progeny. And maybe that's better than being perfect:)
Anyway I thought I'd share a couple "higlights" from the book with you all.
The first is that the author believes that the evolution of life is (on a cosmic scale) inevitable, and that there are probably bacteria-like lifeforms all over the place. He also thinks that things like sight, flight, multicellular life, are also "not improbable". He believes if life were to be wiped out on earth, it would rise again given enough time. But he firmly and adimantly believes that the evolution of eukaryotes (Cells with nuclei and a cell membrane) was a very rare and unlikely result of life on earth because of the way in which it most likely came into being. The difficulty he argues is not producing life itself, but producing eukaryotes. I thought that was interesting because I'd always thought if we ventually found life on Mars, and it was some kind of bacteria, then it would say a lot about the possibility of intellegent life elsewhere in the universe. But Lane argues that may not be the case. It might be extreemly common for bacteria to inhabit every nook and cranny of every habitable planet, but that doesn't necessarily imply that complex life is common or even probable elsewhere.
The second thing is that most scientists believe that mitochondria were once independednt bacteria that somehow eventually became incorporated into already existing eukaryotic cells, but the author asserts that it's too hard to explain how the cell worked before the introduction of mitochondria (which produces all the energy in the form of ATP for cellular function), and therefore argues that the eukaryotic cell evolved simultaneously with mitochondria, and that....bit of luck as it were, is his reason for why it is so much harder to imagine complex life sprouting up everywhere.
The third thing I will mention is that the author also thinks the reason we age and die is not because our telomeres become shorter (as was or is? the reigning hypothesys) it's because of the free radicals produced by mitochondria as they produce ATP. As you age, copies of cells, and the mitochondria within them become less faithful in their construction, and as those errors accumulate in new mitochondria they produce more and more free radicalsand not only destroy the mitochondria themselves, but also the protiens within the cell that perform all kinds of vital functions. They also loose their ability to alert the cell that something is wrong and when it's time to die. Contrary to what people think (like all those people taking tons of anti-oxidants and all that crap) you actually need some amount of free radicals in your body because they regulate overall cell health. It's a no win situation in a way. The free radicals age you, but you can't live without them.
Maybe someday biomedical technology will find a way to change out your mitochondria every ten or twenty years, and we will all live to be several hundred! Wouldn't that be somthing?
Fourth thing is that we have so many mitochondria (which except in VERY rare cases we ONLY inherit from our mothers) that they make up 10% of our body weight!
And finally just because I thought this was kind of funny, and totally explained why I cannot be a vegetarian or eat vegan meat substitutes I thought I'd toss this in. We all have methanogens (methane producing bacteria) living in our guts. We also have sulpher eating bacteria in there competing for space (its a bacterial war zone!) Anyway the methane producing little guys prefer to abide inside vegitarians becase veggies contain little sulphur and so there aren't as many sulphur loving bacteria to compete with. They tend to take over the place and as they enjoy their private party they make you more farty. LOL.
Anyway, there was a lot more in the book, and actually a bunch of really interesting things about bacteria that I didn't know. But I think I'll save that for another day. If you have ever had an interest in learning about mitochondria I highly recommend this book!

The painting is by me of what else? Mitochondria!