Energy: The Missing Dimension of Biomedicine
Understanding Energy Could Help Biomedicine Transition to its Next Stage of Evolution
Energy Science
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In a new essay published in Nature, Chris Kempes and I argue that understanding our energetic nature and thinking about biology energetically is a path to solving some of the biggest problems in human health.
How Should We Think About Life?
In a previous post, we discussed how energy is the key difference between a living, breathing, thinking, feeling person… and a cadaver. When a person dies, the body still exists with all of its organs, cells, organelles, genes, and proteins.
But without energy flow from food to oxygen in our mitochondria, there is no life, growth, development, aging, experiences, or consciousness.
You see, we’re a bit like burning candle flames.
Our bodies are made of the same carbon-based waxy stuff as the shaft or body of a candle. In a candle, its embedded wick provides a substrate to hold the flame. Similarly, metabolism is the conductive substrate embedded in our bodies that hold the flame of life.
Together, your mitochondria, the metabolic enzymes that transform and extract electrons from the food you eat, and the metabolic circuitry of your body are your wick. Your skin and everything it envelops is like the body of the candle.
And you? You are the burning flame. You are the bright qualities that shine through your personality, the way you move and think, and everything else that distinguished who you are.
The warmth you exude–both as thermal energy and as your mood and personality– arises from the continuous flow of electrons towards oxygen, deep in your mitochondria.
In an analogous way, the warmth and radiant light of a flame is sustained by a similar flow of electrons from the wax onto ambient oxygen.
You are like a slow-burning candle flame, contained, regulated, and harnessed by your body’s amazing biology. Unlike the burning candle flame, the wetness of your cells and the right level of energy resistance keeps you from actually combusting—but you are the same movement as the combusting flame. Only a little slower and cooler.
You are the energy that flows and transforms through the body’s metabolic circuitry. Not the circuitry itself. And that’s why the day you stop breathing, the flow of energy through your mitochondria will stop.
And you too, will stop existing—leaving just your inert, waxy body behind.
How Biomedicine Sees Us and Our Health
Through our essay, we hope to inspire more researchers in biology and other disciplines to begin considering this energetic dimension of life in the way they think about life, and in the work that they do.
Biomedicine has operated from the assumption that we’re molecular machines. I now believe that this perspective, although tremendously useful to figure out fundamental biological processes, has led us astray when it comes to understanding the basis of health and disease. And what can be done to help people heal.
If you see yourself as a fleshy molecular machine that carries the flame of life, then when you’re sick or chronically ill, you assume that something is broken.
If that’s the case, then the ideal solution is a quick fix: an external fix, a pharmacological fix, or any other kind of fix. “Something is broken, will you just fix it, please?” we ask our healthcare providers.
That mindset is deeply ingrained in our biomedical culture. And, in fact, throughout our Western culture.
That perspective has driven our search for disease-causing genes and the whole genomics paradigm of disease. In writing the piece for Nature, Chris and I wanted to emphasize that now it’s time to shift our focus from genetics to energetics.
Retiring the View of Humans as Molecular Machines
To make progress in solving big health challenges, I’ve come to the conclusion we need to focus on the energetic dimension of what we are most fundamentally.
Over the last two decades, I have studied how energy in general, and mitochondria in particular, influence biology and health at multiple levels. Our research involved cellular experiments, studies in mice with different kinds of mitochondrial perturbations, people with rare mitochondrial diseases, and people across the broad, naturally-occurring spectrum of mitochondrial energy transformation capacity.
In short, we now know from multiple branches of science that energy doesn’t just “keep the lights on.”
Energy isn’t just permissive in living organisms. It’s instructive.
This means that changes in energetic states can steer the behavior of your genes, your cells, your brain, and your whole being—without any changes in the hardware of your body.
Energy transformation processes lead to energy patterns that emerge and manifest across your body. Some examples are the energy pattern we pick up with electroencephalography (EEG) on the scalp. Or the presence of metabolites, like lactate for example, in your blood.
Those energy patterns unfold and change at seconds-to-hours time scales. They are the software that you experience and the patterns that drive your life.
Again, you’re not the hardware of your body. You are the energy flowing through it. I unpack this in detail in the ENERGY book.
I’m so excited to share this book with the community.
In relation to health, that means that you can be sick, unwell, and in a state of dis-ease (i.e., not feeling at ease), not because your molecular hardware is broken, but because something is off with your energy.
Too much energy, too little energy, or mis-patterned energy can disrupt the regulatory processes and cause symptoms or dis-ease. Energy aberrations might not be visible at first—many forms of energy aren’t.
But over time, they manifest as structural changes that we can ultimately see on a scan or in bloodwork. And that we can label as a disease or disorder.
A key point in our essay is that identifying the upstream energetic states associated with diseases or states of health could point to new targets for treatment, prevention, and health optimization.
This, we think, might be particularly relevant for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and severe mental illnesses, disorders for which decades of extensive molecular research have not yet led to cures.
What This New Essay Calls For
If we keep thinking of ourselves as molecular machines and fail to recognize our energetic nature, biomedicine might waste precious time developing imperfect solutions that target superficial symptoms without addressing the core, root causes of our dis-ease.
Illnesses, we are discovering, are energy sinks. Illness costs energy, forcing tradeoffs that impact how we can function in our daily lives. That’s why when you’re sick, you cannot be your best self. If you’re sick, you can’t operate at your full potential.
Diseases sucks our precious energy, and sap our potential, keeping us from thriving.
In the essay, we outline why we should think of health and disease energetically. We share examples of how an energetic perspective of life leads to new insights around diseases. And we discuss challenges and opportunities that arise for biomedical scientists as we revisit how we think about energy.
It’s exciting to be alive at a point in history where we’ve spent enough time developing, pursuing, and testing the molecular hypothesis of disease to know that it’s incorrect and incomplete. But it’s also a time where we have a science of energy that is developed enough that we have tools and theories to discover our energetic nature.
The consilience of scientific successes and failures, along with the richness of our individual experiences of energetic states, position us as a community to develop approaches to harness knowledge around our energetic nature to inform health-promoting and pro-healing strategies.
New energy-based technologies to read (detect, diagnose) and write (support, inform, and energize) health states are being developed. Exciting developments are on the horizon.
Moving Ahead With Humility
Part of the challenge ahead for scientists is twofold.
First, we need to have the humility to acknowledge that we’ve been pursuing a defunct biomedical model mostly disconnected from the human experience. Second, we need to come together to discover the most actionable knowledge, which lies not deep within disciplinary silos, but rather at the intersections of disciplines.
These intersections—in-between disciplines—are where the greatest potential lies to make discoveries that can positively impact human lives.
In a reflection on how to capture aging and move us towards healthspan, Buck Institute CEO Eric Verdin, who has long been dedicated to developing drugs to combat aging, recently wrote “That intersection, between lived experience and measurable biology, is where I think the real work is.”
Agreed, Eric. Thank you.
We are the burning flame, not the inert structure that supports it.
Let’s reconsider how we think about energy and see where this leads us.
Curious about what mitochondria look like and how they move, connect, and give rise to life and mind? Visit MitoLife to learn more about the beautiful diversity of mitochondria.
The point about Alzheimer's and cancer is particularly compelling. Both diseases show mitochondrial dysfunction years before structural pathology is detectable. If we had been thinking energetically from the start, we might have recognized earlier that these are diseases of disrupted energy flow, not simply of aberrant molecules.
The shift from genetics to energetics feels like the move medicine needs to make, not abandoning molecular biology, but putting it within a more complete picture of what life actually is.
It’s about time for this…