biology

In the 1920s, Otto Warburg noticed something strange about tumors. Cancer cells were consuming glucose at an astonishing rate—far more than normal cells. And they were fermenting it to lactate, even when oxygen was plentiful. This made no biochemical sense. Fermentation yields only 2 ATP per glucose. Oxidative phosphorylation

Your cells are eating themselves right now. Not all of themselves—just the damaged parts. The broken organelles. The misfolded proteins. The accumulated debris that would otherwise gum up the works. This process is called autophagy, from the Greek for "self-eating." And when cells specifically target damaged mitochondria

David Sinclair has made a career out of trying to reverse aging. The Harvard geneticist has been at the center of longevity research for over two decades, starting with his work on sirtuins—a family of proteins that seemed to mediate the life-extending effects of caloric restriction. That work was

In 2004, a group of undergraduates at MIT entered a competition to build biological machines. The challenge: design standardized genetic parts, assemble them into functional systems, and demonstrate that biology could be engineered like any other technology. The competition was called iGEM—the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. That first

For four billion years, life evolved through random mutation and natural selection. Slow. Undirected. Whatever worked, survived. Now we're learning to design it. Synthetic biology is the engineering of living systems. It treats cells as programmable machines, DNA as code, proteins as components. The goal isn't

Let's pull it together. We've traced mitochondria from their bacterial origins to their central role in cellular energy, from their separate genome to their implications for aging and disease, from their quality control systems to their presence at the heart of cancer metabolism, from their inheritance