Science in Progress - Proposed Research

Preface: 

This work is not in its complete format, but just some prewriting/brainstorming for my final essay in this class. Overall, I want to look at relationships through a scientific and possibly religious lens, and below contains a selection of that. Enjoy and please let me know what you think and what I can do to improve this! Thanks! 

Caution: Below contains the information of controversial dangers: love and relationships. 

 

Hydrogen and Mitochondria 

His dark brown eyes look into my own of a lighter hue.
Light bounces in, and its signal is accepted by photoreceptors. This will be sent to the brain to be processed.
He touches my hand.
Receptors send a signal through the peripheral nervous system. An electrochemical signal responds, stimulating cardiac muscles. Shorter repolarization of action potentials cause the heart to contract more frequently, producing premature heart palpitations. Simultaneously an electrical signal is sent through the nervous system in the form of action potentials into the T-tubule of muscle cells. This promotes the release of calcium into the sacromere, which binds to the troponin on an actin filament. Actin binds to the myosin head and through a powerstroke, contracts. Over several sacromeres, the entire muscle contracts.
My hand reaches for his.
ATP floods into the sacromere and binds to the myosin head. It frees itself from the actin filament. The muscle relaxes.
My hand relaxes in his.
The yellow, brown and orange sand "steps" lies beneath our feet. The massive open expanse of eroded sandstone above our heads. Our mouths gape at the breathtaking view: miles upon miles of green trees planted in the mist of brown and sandy ridges. The grey clouds cover what could have been a blue sky. After a couple of miles of hiking in Hocking Hills, foraging our own path through the cold mud and slightly frozen ground, awkwardly walking in a single file, refusing to take his hand for support, slipping down the hill and being covered in mud, silently running out of things to say, we have made it . . . Old Man's Cave. . . He is holding my hand. . . . We have survived.

Our first date.

Companionship has been ingrained into our brain by society and religion. Since the beginning of civilization, marriage has been an upheld institution. But even before that in Genesis, there has been a need for a union of two. It was only through marriage of two individuals that God created us in his image. Since the days of Eden, we have needed another individual to live with, understand, sympathize with, cherish, and love until our dying days. We need someone to be with us through sickness and through health. We need someone to bring out the best in us. We need someone to make us complete.

 I want to say that T and I had that perfect compatibility. We both needed companionship and both enjoyed the company of each other. Both biology nerds - I mean, majors - we could revel in the biology jokes or nerdy pick-up lines like, "If I were an enzyme, I would be DNA helicase so that I could unzip your genes" . . . haha, it is funny, right? Anyway, we would laugh at that.

We could complain in the hardships of our anatomy lab, dissecting the pig that he had named after the king in One Thousand and One Nights. We studied physiology, evolution and chemistry together. We suffered through organic chemistry together, through the good and bad days and exams. We borrowed each other's books: micro, cell bio, genetics, physics. We both discussed and agreed on religion together as he was Catholic and I Protestant.

We both supported one another. He hugged me during the liver failure and later death of my aunt during finals week of Winter Quarter freshman year. He let me cry on his shoulder when I heard the news of my grandma's death finals week of that Spring Quarter. I was there for him when he was anxious about grad school, his majors, his indecision for a Double Major in Math, a minor in Chemistry, or his frustration in not having work summer of Sophomore/Junior Year. We were there for each other. In texting he was the first person I talked to in the morning and last person that I wished good night. He was my best friend.

It was a symbiotic relationship.
   
Mitochondria have two membranes surrounding its matrix and its own set of DNA - which is believed to be passed down from our mother's mitochondria in the egg. In many aspects it acts like a bacteria or prokaryotic cell, existing in our own eukaryotic cells - a fancy name for complex cells with organelles, organization and which typically exist in multi-cellular organisms like us -. Theoretically, this is all because the mitochondria once existed as bacteria and were engulfed by the larger eukaryote. In exchange for protection, it broke down pyruvate into ATP, which the cell could use as energy to maintain itself. It converted pyruvate into acetyl CoA to be generated into the Citric Acid Cycle to make coenzymes. These coenzymes NADH and FADH2 supply the protons pumped through the inner membrane of the mitochondria and generate electrons through the Electron Transport Chain. This proton gradient forces the creation of ATP. Hence, it creates energy. As basic as water and food are to us, we need our mitochondria to break down that food into energy. We need that energy in order to live.

We need our symbiotic relationships.
 
 In an ideal world, mitochondria generates energy. Our cells work. Our body is maintained. Yet our life is not perfect. We age. Our mitochondria generate reactive oxygen species, or oxygen radicals through the pumping of hydrogen in Complex I and III of the Electron Transport Chain. If not removed, these build up in the cells. They act as a toxin and promote decline in cellular function. As our cells degrade, our bodies break down. We age.

The words echo through my head. I have known for a month that they are coming. Maybe longer. The busy schedules, the lack of communication, the infrequent texts, the distance in living, the fact that he goes out to lunch more with his other friends than tries to find time to spend with me, the fact that I am way to busy with school, work or band to care, the fact that he is drinking more than I would like, the fact that I am angry with him and will not share why, the fact that we are changing . . . growing . . . All of this acts as ligands, or signals. My receptors should have accepted them and prepared.

"I just don't think this is working out."

 Instead, I imagine that this was probably something that hydrogen would say when leaving its NADH in the mitochondria. It flits away across the inner mitochondrial membrane. It probably had a jolly time with NAD, but it has to leave. It needs to cross the membrane to create the proton gradient to force ATP to be made.

I wonder what if the cell had said that to the mitochondria. Would we still be living? Would we be as big or complex? But what if it had been a faulty mitochondria? Overloaded with too much food to generate ATP? What if it produced too many ROS?

Was I a faulty mitochondria? Had I let too much work and school overload me and make me a faulty mitochondria, not providing enough for this relationship? Had I provided too much? Too much that the cell was overwhelmed? That had the body age too quickly? Degrade too quickly?

Religion helps perpetuate the societal ideal for the perfect companion. It speaks against adultery. It mentions that the husband must love the wife and the wife the husband. It upholds the purity before marriage, that marriage is sacred. But it does not dictate on how to know how many people you will go through to find that "perfect someone?" It does not give a magical rule that you will "date seven people, marry, have two children, a dog . . .

And it is not supposed to. Rather it gives strength. It gives the power and strength to be independent. The faith to accept whatever your life will yield. That maybe you will find someone and maybe not. Maybe you will be the ideal mitochondria, or maybe hydrogen . . . 

Hydrogen eventually diffuses out of the inner membrane space of the mitochondria and into the cell. Eventually it finds and binds to some other element, most likely oxygen. There it becomes more stable and remains with that element until eventually it will leave again and bind to something else again.

Or maybe a faulty mitochondria . . .

But maybe the mitochondria did not need the cell or the body . . . Could it have lived without the cell? Could it have been independent and strong, remained single? In that case, would it not have been known as mitochondria . . . would it not be a microbe? A bacteria?

 He sits down next to me in class. He asks nonchalantly about winter break, about all the weeks that I have not seen him. He laughs at some stupid joke or woe that I share about work. He shares his drama with his roommates in the apartment. I express my sympathy. We do not mention the _________. It does not exist. It did not happen; we were not in a relationship. Neither of us were mitochondria, neither of us were hydrogen with oxygen or NADH. No. We are bacteria. That are single-celled and independent.

That just happen to live in symbiosis.

****Note: Since this is a work in progress and just a flushing out of ideas, I apologize for any choppiness. Please let me know what I can do to improve it!!! : ) Let me know if there is any scientific terms I need to clarify, or if this is just too much! Or there is something else you feel that I need to address! Thanks! Also note, I don't want this to be too depressing - T and I are really good friends.