LEARNING – Chapter Three, section one

It matters little to the overall shape of things in the world that I know barnacles stand on their heads and eat with their feet. But I can tell you that it makes a great difference to me when I stoop at ocean’s edge and see them feed. What a delightful moment. Pleasure is immediate when I watch their fern-like feet search the shallow water for food. I feel like God has let me in on a private joke. I am glad I learned about barnacles.

It matters little to the overall shape of things in the world that I learned about the mitochondrion. This is not a medieval town; it is a hungry little sausage-shaped entity living in eucaryotic cells (the sort we are made of) and is a biological miracle. I understand that, technically speaking, miracles do not visit biology. Still, this seems like one.

Imagine one of your own cells pumped up to 100,000 times its normal size. Toss this six-foot pulsing membrane out on the lawn, watch how it works, continually changing shape, bulging here and snapping back there, oozy but contained by its thin, outer membrane. Watch your foot—a cell eats nearly everything within reach! Inside that enlarged cell you can see a colony of fifty to five thousand mitochondria.

Like all bacteria, the submicroscopic mitochondrion originally lived in the air, was driven by a voracious appetite, and regularly leapt onto things (like our teeth) to feed. Uncontrolled, nothing was safe in its company. Not even a mutually hungry single cell. Consequently, says biologist Lynn Margulis, a prehistoric deal was struck, a beneficial one.

Mitochondria were invited by life processes to live inside all cells with a nucleus. They agreed not to eat their hosts as long as cells agreed to provide a constant supply of food. Fair enough. Working at a 50 percent efficiency level, mitochondria pods surrender to the host cell all the energy produced by their mighty munching. By that energy, all forms of life are animated. 

“And they lived happily ever after.” Mitochondria dart about and feed in cytoplasmic currents like my stubborn old goldfish, Sartre, swims and feeds in his aquarium. Thanks to the cooperative venture between cells and mitochondria, corn grows, fish swim, frogs leap, and human high jumpers make it over the bar. Only it should not be so.

My attention was seized by this news one day as I skimmed books about cells. I was looking for information about the brain but fell across the fact that the mitochondrion has its own DNA. This is as unlikely as saying human beings live well on the ocean floor. Impossible I kept reading. I lingered. I learned.

DNA, the blueprint for life, consists of four chemical molecules that, depending upon their coded arrangement, turn out beach grass, warthogs, college professors, or land crabs (which once marched as an army across southern Florida from the Atlantic, through my garage, to the Gulf of Mexico). DNA never equivocates. I can be defective, but it does not equivocate. Setting different codes for every single living thing, DNA then safeguards each arrangement against the intrusion of any other. Mitochondria break the rule.

In the case of humans, every cell (trillions for each of us) holds in its nucleus forty-eight chromosomes that house about three thousand genes each. Every gene holds a yard’s worth of two carefully twisted spaghetti-like strands coated with the billions of chemical bits mentioned above, DNA. Oh yes, that “yard’s worth” of stuff packed in a gene is equivalent to “30 miles of gold thread stuffed into a cherry pit,” says geneticist John Medina in his book, The Outer Limits of Life. Every living entity has its own and onlyits own DNA. That is the law of life.

Now enters our submicroscopic, sausage-shaped, energy-producing organelle: the mitochondrion. What business does it have in corn, cattle, or your cells when its blueprint disqualifies it? The DNA of mitochondria resembles hula-hoops, not our twisted spaghetti stuff. It carries along a complicated biological story of a female transmitted part of you that is absolutely essential but technically, uh, not you. The rules crumble. Mitochondria with its own DNA ignores all “No Trespassing” signs, climbs the fence, grazes in all living things, and sets us in motion. Technically, it should not. It does avoid bacteria and some forms of algae, but otherwise it lives in, and animates, all else.

It matters little to the overall shape of things in the world that I read about mitochondria. But it matters tremendously to me. Learning even as little as I have about it, I sense the wonder of being, the miracle of animation, the unexpected flexibility of biology, the privilege of a mind.

Learning is to us what the mitochondria is to the eukaryotic cell—that is, it is energy and vitality, surprise and necessity. Whatwe learn about things, ideas, people, sports statistics, the golden mean, or the making of tofu is not nearly as important as thatwe learn; that we acquire knowledge or skill by study, instruction or experience. If we commit ourselves to being real, that is, authentic, mentally and emotionally energized, safely connected to others in our world, sensitive to the moment, and moved by solid values, we will need to know that learning matters. And, I believe, by instruction or experience we must learn at least these three things:

·      Leisure is work worth doing

·      Ignorance is a self-imposed prison

·      Life is always a lesson, whether or not we learn it

COMING UP:  Leisure Is Work Worth Doing

Some things I understand so slightly that it is best that I say little about them. Aristotle, for example . . .

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