Hopefully this post does not come over merely as the grumbling of an old scientist but grumbling it is. My research field was, and my current scientific interest remains in the ageing of mitochondria and their role in senescence.
Anyone who has chanced on my blog posts will know that my focus has always been on the electrical nature of mitochondria and on the entropic nature of the Free Energy they generate. Now, to understand this post you must first understand that mitochondria ‘belong’ to the biochemists, the molecular biologists, the geneticists (and molecular geneticists), the cell biologists, the physiologists and even the medics: they all have their particular ‘take’ on mitochondria. All, pretty much nowadays, agree that mitochondria play a central, even THE role in the ageing of an organism. None have any idea what to do about the ageing of mitochondria … and that is despite phenomenal advances in all of their fields in the last 40 years.
At the start of the paragraph above I used words like capacitance and entropy. The former, capacitance, belongs to the world of wires, charges, voltages, resistance, amps and coulombs. In other words, the world of the electronic engineer. The second word entropy belongs to the world of the physical chemist: enthalpy, entropy, equilibria, Gibbs free energy, joules and statistics (maths!). There is virtually no substantial research on mitochondria as physical chemical electronic devices despite their having trans membrane potentials ( voltages); electron flow (amps); and capacitance ( farads). That is despite mitochondria initiating cell death when they depolarise ( ie short out to earth ) and losing membrane density as they age (capacitance). There is just as little about the energy mitochondria generate. It is blithely written as Free Energy but unthought of as a hybrid concept embodying enthalpy and entropy. Cholesterol is not mentioned for its ability to increase the dielectric of a membrane; of course not, what’s ‘dielectric’ to a protein molecular cluster specialist?
I am not trying to show what a great polymath I am. Having specialised early in physical biochemistry and later worked as a software programmer and later still worked in the micro-electronics world, all of the above ‘insights’ are obvious to me. No, my point is that if you are a young researcher and mitochondria are what you are looking at then you will be in a silo of one of the areas above in which mitochondria ‘belong’. It is pointless for you even to know what the electronics engineer or the physical chemist would think as their world is closed to you.
This is a then a grumble about specialisation leading to silo knowledge and research. Nothing new here, but maybe with AI there is a chance that at least the walls of the silos will become visible. Just AI lookup ‘the role of electrical capacitance on the aging of mitochondria’ and you’ll get the picture.
AI will let you know what you don’t know.
