Nick Lane Quotes

#1. Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

Nick Lane

#2. The igneo-aerial food. In other words, despite

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#3. Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different.

Nick Lane

#4. Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields.

Nick Lane

#5. At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists.

Nick Lane

#6. Listeria ... secretes two or three proteins that together hijack the host cell's cytoskeleton. As a result, the bacteria motor around the inside of the infected cell, pushed by an actin 'comet tail' that associates and dissociates behind them.

Nick Lane

#7. Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

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#8. the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. Thankfully, uniparental inheritance means that men don't pass on their mitochondria at all.

Nick Lane

#9. The environment most realistically capable of giving rise to life, whether here or anywhere else in the universe, is alkaline hydrothermal vents. Such vents constrain cells to make use of natural proton gradients, and ultimately to generate their own.

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#10. multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

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#11. of oxygen, whether we think of it as 'good' or 'bad', is the formation of free radicals. As conventionally stated, the idea that breathing oxygen causes ageing is disarmingly simple. We produce free

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#12. Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved.

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#13. Petty human squabbles over borders and oil and creed vanish in the knowledge that this living marble surrounded by infinite emptiness is our shared home, and more, a home we share with, and owe to, the most wonderful inventions of life.

Nick Lane

#14. it's no mystery that all cells here on earth should be chemiosmotic. I would expect that cells across the universe will be chemiosmotic too.

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#15. This chapter is different from the other chapters in this book, in that not only does science not (yet) know the answer, but at present we can barely conceive of how that answer might look in terms of the known laws of physics or biology or information.

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#16. The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

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#17. One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.

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#18. Storing genes, vulnerable informational systems, in the immediate vicinity of the mitochondrial respiratory chains, which leak destructive free radicals, is equivalent to storing a valuable library in the wooden shack of a registered pyromaniac.

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#19. In an average person, ATP is produced at a rate of 9 x 1020 molecules per second, which equates to a turnover rate (the rate at which it is produced and consumed) of about 65 kg every day.

Nick Lane

#20. Mitochondrial genes act like a female surname, which enables us to trace our ancestry down the female line in the way some families try to trace their descent down the male line from William the Conqueror, or Noah, or Mohammed.

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#21. A piece of bad news wrapped in a protein coat.

Nick Lane

#22. Ribosomes have an error rate of about one letter in 10,000, far lower than the defect rate in our own high-quality manufacturing processes. And they operate at a rate of about 10 amino acids per second, building whole proteins with chains comprising hundreds of amino acids in less than a minute.

Nick Lane

#23. Occam's razor, the philosophical basis of all science: assume the simplest natural cause. That answer might turn out not to be correct, but we should not resort to more complex reasoning unless it is shown to be necessary.

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#24. All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

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#25. Establishment. In 1966, the Dutch geologist M. G. Rutten could write, in a charmingly antiquated style that has passed forever from the scientific journals:

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#26. Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that?

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#27. But whatever our beliefs, this richness of understanding should be a cause for marvel and celebration.

Nick Lane

#28. It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

Nick Lane

#29. Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry.

Nick Lane

#30. As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility.

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#31. But mammals have at their disposal ten times the resources, they

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#32. Buchner proposed that fermentation was carried out by biological catalysts that he named enzymes (from the Greek en zyme, meaning in yeast). He concluded that living cells are chemical factories, in which enzymes manufacture the various products.

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#33. If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that's the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth.

Nick Lane

#34. Mitochondria, as we have seen, are only passed on in the egg, so all 13 mitochondrial genes come from our mothers. If these genes really do influence lifespan, and we can only inherit them from our mothers, then our own lifespan should reflect that of our mothers but not our fathers.

Nick Lane

#35. NASA 'working definition' of life, for example: life is 'a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution'.

Nick Lane