Weekly Digest 7
WEEKLY DIGEST
This week on The Science and Experience of Energy, we explored two moments of discovery.
The first reflects on a pivotal mentorship that helped bridge stress and mitochondrial biology, clarifying how our lived experience is biologically embedded through mechanisms such as allostatic load.
The second descends into the nanometer world of electron microscopy, where aligned cristae and mitochondrial networks suggest that these tiny organelles can communicate and reorganize in coordinated ways.
Across scales, a common theme emerges: connection. Between people. Between ideas. Between organelles. Energy flow and information exchange may be central to both resilience and disease.
I hope you enjoy these pieces. Thank you for joining our community.
Finding a Loving Mentor—Bruce McEwen
Shortly after receiving my PhD, I was working on a new idea that brought mitochondria into the stress-disease cascade. It felt important—like the long-sought missing link. But personally, I felt comparatively unimportant and unequipped to make that bridge.
Discovering How Mitochondria Communicate
In 2009, my colleagues Gyorgy Hajnoczky, Orian Shirihai, and others described the mitochondrial “kiss-and-run” where two mitochondria came close together, exchanged fluorescent proteins, and quickly moved away from each other.