If you’ve read anything at all promoting 3-person IVF, you’ve no doubt seen the analogy that the cellular organelles called mitochondria “just” produce energy, and that the biologically extreme technique often misleadingly called “mitochondrial replacement,” which would combine genetic material from three people into an embryo, is comparable to merely “changing a battery.”
The connotation is immediate: Just as changing a battery in a computer doesn’t affect the hard disk, so too, the logic goes, would this technique – more accurately termed nuclear genome transfer – merely provide the resulting person with a healthy new source of energy (from the second woman’s mitochondria.)
The mitochondria-as-batteries analogy has always been spurious, and for numerous reasons. But it has now, thankfully, collapsed.
A new article in New Scientist lays out the evidence. It reviews case after case that supports a “new paradigm” whereby mitochondria are understood not merely as energy sources, but as important actors in and of themselves, greatly influencing numerous complex traits that do in fact make people who they are.
Read full, original article: The Collapse of a Dangerous Analogy: Or, why mitochondria are much more than batteries
