📜 Mitochondria are alive
By Liyam Chitayat | 8 minute read
The precise definition of “life” has been debated since the inception of biology as a scientific field. Even today, researchers offer overlapping, but distinct, criteria. Molecular biologists tend to focus on characteristics like metabolism, growth and development, response to stimuli, reproduction, and the ability to process information or evolve. This definition uses “checklists” to determine whether or not an organism is alive.
Biophysicists often take a more rigorous approach, defining life by means of energetic terms. Physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Ilya Prigogine said that living organisms maintain order despite the universe’s tendency towards increasing entropy, a measure of how dispersed or disordered the energy within a system is. Living systems maintain far-from-equilibrium states, constantly exchanging matter and energy with their environment to sustain highly organized structures. Cells take in low-entropy inputs, such as food or sunlight, and expel high-entropy outputs, including waste.
Regardless of which definition one chooses, mitochondria are clearly alive.
Reading time: 8 minutes.
Art by Zach Lieberman.