Nick Lane

So I'm immediately left wondering, how is it all controlled?

How do you get this cell to have a coherent behavior so it decides I'm going to crawl over there?

How do you even know what state you're in?

How do you kind of synchronize all of this biochemistry?

And probably most people's answer to that would be metabolic regulation of one sort or another.

But that's not really the driver.

The driver in the end is the thermodynamic drivers.

How many electrons do you have?

That's in the form of food or NADH or whatever it may be.

How much energy do you have in the form of ATP?

These are the things that are going to synchronize reactions in the same kind of phase.

Right.

And the problem there is when you're dealing with molecules, you're dealing with tens of thousands of them.

So you've got a kind of large statistical sampling, which is time-consuming to figure out.

But there is a better way of doing it, which is to say if you're taking electrons from food in NADH and you're passing them...

to oxygen, but you're generating a membrane potential and that's driving ATP synthesis, you can actually measure the rate of change and the membrane potential and the fields that will be generated, electrostatic and electromagnetic fields.

That's going to give you a handle on your state.

on your metabolic state in relation to the outside world.

Is there enough food there?

Is there enough oxygen there?