Rachel Nuwer writes:

It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point, if he was awake, he also provided a saliva sample and filled out a survey about his mood.

The room looked like a cell, or perhaps a very cramped hotel room, but in fact it was a metabolic research chamber, one of only 50 of its kind in the world. Its conspicuously small size prevented Picard from burning extra energy beyond the bare minimum needed to keep him alive. Napping during the day was prohibited, as was eating anything but the strictly scheduled meals tailored to his caloric needs. Bedtime was at 11 p.m. sharp. Before lights-out, Picard put on a device to monitor his vitals and brain activity while he slept.

Though there wasn’t much to do — mostly he sat in bed reading or working on his laptop — excitement was the primary emotion Picard felt that day in July 2021. That’s because he was the first volunteer in an experiment run by the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab, which he directs at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. By studying how much energy is required to sustain baseline existence, his lab aims to explore what he considers an overlooked factor in health and disease, from the level of molecules all the way up to the mind: mitochondria.

Most middle school students learn that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. These organelles make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, through a cascade of chemical reactions that breaks down glucose and fat from food. But mitochondria are much more than energy factories. Studies over the past decade have shown that they process all sorts of molecules, including neurotransmitters, hormones, and metabolites, which means they directly impact what we experience as mood, stress, sexual arousal, and the need to sleep. This makes them “the consilience point for many known processes demonstrated to underlie consciousness,” Picard said.

More broadly, in what he calls his “energetic view of life,” Picard posits that distinct energetic states exist for health and disease, and that mitochondria are the tiny transformers responsible for them. According to this view, the flow of electrons from food to oxygen in metabolism, as processed by mitochondria, is the most basic level of the experience of being alive. [Continue reading…]