In his book Projections, Karl Deisseroth describes an aspect of life that is fascinating, and that is we owe our existence as he writes to “an ancient class of microbes called archaebacteria—who brought the mysterious skill of using oxygen for energy when they traveled into, and dwelt within, our cellular forebears more than two billion years ago.” Overtime these “small oxygen burners became our mitochondria, the energy factories for each cell.” Our cells, in other words, host mitochondria and that is how the oxygen we breathe becomes energy we use to live.
What Deisseroth does is then frame this cellular relationship as a metaphor for all relationships. Because billions of years ago those initial archaebacteria had to cross a cellular border and be allowed to survive and dwell within another entity, which is not typical. Overtime, and now “living together, these two kinds of life had to coevolve… [and] mutually accommodate each other’s limitations and oddities.”
Deisseroth’s point is we can learn from how mitochondria and cells have crossed borders, maintained their individuality and unique strengths, and together produce what they could not separately, and that is something new and miraculous.
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