Conceptual Paper

Infinitesimal Grandeur: The Life of Electrons, and How They Sculpt the World

McCully B¹* and Dodampahala H²

¹A/Professor, Monash University, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Mildura Base Public Hospital, Australia

²Professor in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka

Submission: July 09, 2025;Published:July 23, 2025

*Corresponding author:A/Professor Brian McCully, Monash University, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Mildura Base Public Hospital, Australia

How to cite this article: McCully B, Dodampahala H. Infinitesimal Grandeur: The Life of Electrons, and How They Sculpt the World. JOJ Case Stud. 2025; 15(3): 555914.DOI: 10.19080/JOJCS.2025.15.555914.

Keywords: Beating heart, Chlorophyll, Consciousness, Mitochondria, Natural electrochemical gradient, Biological sophistication, Oxidative phosphorylation

Introduction

Strip life down to its essence, and what remains is not shape, limb or even appetite — but a hidden torrent of electrons, forever tumbling from states of high energy to low. This is life’s primal transaction, the infinitesimal grandeur that runs beneath claws, chlorophyll and consciousness alike.

To understand life, we must follow electrons, for it is they that are the ultimate architects of life's form and function. They are the silent choreographers, shaping everything from the flick of a fish's fin to the tireless pulse of a beating heart. Life did not so much invent this flow as evolve around it – biology wrapping itself in ever more intricate layers and systems to harness this ceaseless energy: jaws, leaves, the hair on our heads — all just clever contrivances to keep electrons moving.

This paper examines how electrons, as the fundamental source of energy, shaped the emergence of life. From their restless motion in the mineral-rich soup of early Earth, proto-metabolic redox reactions arose, which forged the first organic compounds. Life evolved by wrapping itself ever more intricately around this ancient cascade: inventing ATP to package electron energy, then leaping to oxidative phosphorylation and the electron transport chain to harvest it with breathtaking efficiency. The mitochondrial symbiosis shattered old geometric constraints, unleashing the energetic surplus that made life as we know it possible.

We trace this path from mitochondria to multicellular magnificence, from birth to human cognition, as electrons leap from sugars to oxygen, forging ATP by the trillions to power muscles, drive desire, and inspire the quiet muse of reading pages.

Discussion

A question

What do seawater chasms, sex, and a half a loaf of bread have in common? One might imagine many answers, but few, I think, would come close. So, let’s try another, a simpler question this time, from which I'm sure we'll find our way. 

What do algae in bloom, a squid squirting ink, an ant foraging, or a child brushing her teeth have in common? All are creatures in action, doing things, whether protecting, preening, posing, or simply staying alive. Life is about motion, and beneath that is the relentless flow of electrons cascading down gradients of charge, demanding ever more clever investments of form to keep them moving. This is why jaws snap, why fins flick, why hearts beat — each is a covenant struck to secure the fuel that lets electrons flow [1-4].

The search for food, whether to make it or take it, has become the driving force that has shaped the form and function of everything around us, from acacia trees, tiered with leaves, to giraffes with necks stretched high to reach them [5,6]. From prokaryotes to mammoths, from pond slime to the Cheewhat Giants of Canada, every cell of life needs food to power the things it does, the movements and actions that voice all the many verbs of its vocabulary [3,4,7]. Without this, everything stops. Ultimately, the purpose of life is to eat and use the energy this brings to sustain all it does [3,4,8].

If we consider life this way, we see bodies and shapes that are, by and large, designed primarily to eat and, if they're lucky, to avoid being eaten themselves [6,7]. Predators have become very good at this. They are fierce and fast, armed with jaws and teeth, claws and beaks to stab and shatter, and limbs long and sleek to chase their prey. Their quarry has become equally adept at hiding and fending, shielding itself behind all manner of defences to outwit its foe.

Whatever they be, the innumerable iterations of form are all just variations of a theme that opens a mouth at one end, fills it and empties what's left at the other – all that's in between gets filled or frilled by the accoutrements of function, limbs to fight and flee, organs to digest and egress, and senses to know the world around it [3,6]. Whether it's a finned fish darting, a gazelle lithe and grazing, or a frog fat and wet croaking in the rain, all things evolved to become bigger or smaller, swift or sluggard, limbed, finned or feathered and winged in ways that best help keep bellies full and bodies safe from the ravage of hungry others [3,6,7]. Those who excel at doing so are those who become best at living.

If we look at life this way, food and the grind to find it are the fundamental goals of life, and to think otherwise comes only in the leisure of having first filled that hunger [4,8]. In such light, we are the arms and legs, mouths and intestinal systems acquired to digest food, in and out and to enable all things we do in between.

Perhaps. But peel back this purpose, and you will find it is electrons that insist on their cascade. Food is only the courier. Each limb, each tooth, each cunning feint on a moonlit plain is a strategy devised over eons to sustain provenance so that electrons keep moving through myriad chains inside each cell to keep the ceaseless transaction of charge alive. That is the insatiable force behind all appetite [1-4].

Looking back

Fossil records tell us that all of this may have begun around 4 billion years ago [9,10]. Let’s allow those few short words to sink in and, with them, the staggering amount of time they contain. We can start by remembering that a billion years is a thousand million years, a series of zeros so long that it’s hard to conceive just how much fits within it [9]. I am just over 60 years old. If we were to equate each of these years to Earth's long history, for the first half of such a span, life was little more than just the freckles on my skin, tiny marks of colour, browned in the sun and spread by whim like splashes from the bristles of a wet brush [10,11].

Move forward, towards, say, my last birthday, just a year away, and we’d find ourselves almost 70 million years in the past, as the Earth was cooling from the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs were still furious; the seas were teeming, and birds were making their timid aerial debut [10,12]. In just another few weeks, or 4 million years of real-time, a meteor would flame across the heavens and lay waste to nearly 75% of all living species. In the aftermath, mammals would begin as shadows darting in the underbrush until eventually, they would take dusty steps on the moon [12,13]. If we examine recorded human history, from the Mona Lisa at the Louvre to the rise and fall of ancient empires and the long trek of ancient feet across arid African deserts, just about all would be said and done in the last day and a half of our metaphor [13].

Geochemical surgings

Long before any of this, while the Earth was still heaving beneath the barrage of volcanic eruptions and impact craters, deep ocean currents broiled with chemical energy [14,15]. Hydrogen gas bubbled from underwater vents — chimney-like structures that vented hot gases and minerals from the crust — while the ocean around them lay rich with dissolved carbon dioxide [14,16]. Inside these vents, the water was hot and acidic, while the surrounding seawater was cooler and alkaline. Microscopic compartments formed thin walls of iron-nickel sulphides, allowing ions to flow selectively from one side to another [15,17].

At these interfaces, a natural electrochemical gradient — a charge potential — emerged with enough force to drive redox reactions [14-17]. In these, electrons were transferred from one substance to another: one atom or molecule, the electron donor, lost electrons through oxidation and became more positively charged, while another, the electron acceptor, gained them and became reduced, not in size, but in electrical potential. Electrons carry energy, and as they move from one molecule to another, that energy is transferred, transformed, and released as a usable force [14,15].

These reactions were not yet part of life. They powered the abiotic synthesis of methane and other organic compounds, including amino acids, giving rise to the earliest proto-metabolic cycles — the first tentative steps toward the metabolic pathways that life would one day inherit [16,17].

Life emerged as an exquisite way to harness this energy, transforming a universal force into organic structure. This laid the groundwork for everything to come. Life did not invent this flow; it internalized and organized it. Or, put another way, it grew around it, as this primal current invested itself in ever-deeper layers of biological sophistication [15-17].

Proton gradients and the birth of ATP

Over time, these prebiotic, mineral-edged proto-metabolic systems gave rise to increasingly complex organic molecules [18]. The next great transition was the emergence of primitive structures that could contain these processes — the first protocells [18,19].

This was almost 3.8 billion years ago. The environment was largely anaerobic — it lacked oxygen — and simple lipid vesicles, precursors to cell membranes, had begun to form early boundaries capable of internalizing the redox chemistry that once played freely across rock surfaces [19]. This marked the dawn of cellular autonomy, the earliest form of life's architecture. These fragile, leaky protocells did not create new chemistry; they adapted and enclosed what already worked, corralling the restless motion of electrons and the energy they produced within a boundary that could begin to direct their dance [19].

With this came a new dilemma: how to maintain an internal economy that could store, transfer, and deploy this energy in a structured circuit rather than chaotic bursts. Left to itself, energy unbridled is as fleeting as a puff of wind or the splash of a hot stew stirred briskly — it comes and goes, lost and wasted if not channelled judiciously [18,20].

The answer was adenosine triphosphate, also known as ATP [1,2]. In early chemical systems, phosphate bonds were a crucial means of storing and transferring energy. ATP — adenosine triphosphate - arose from combining adenine, the same used to build DNA, with two phosphate atoms. Add another, and you have ATP, adenosine triphosphate. But 'add' is too gentle a word; it takes a powerful pinch to press this ensemble together, and it trembles with the strain, like a wrestler's muscles flexed in a pose [1-3]. So accrued, ATP wanders through the cell as a svelte sommelier, its plateau à verres held steady as it serves its fare. When done, it shimmies back to the bar as ADP, refills its platter with phosphate, and returns to the crowd in a ceaseless, relentless circuit [1-3].

In this way, ATP packaged the energy of electrons, ensuring it was stored, and poured out with deft precision to meet the needs of living organisms. Once life began using ATP, its efficiency and versatility made it irreplaceable, and it became, over time, the universal metabolic currency of all life [1-4].

The most ancient method of ATP production was likely substrate-level phosphorylation. In this process, a phosphate group is directly transferred from a high-energy organic molecule to ADP, forming ATP without the need for membrane gradients or oxygen [1,3,4]. It is a straightforward, anaerobic strategy unfolding in the cytoplasm of nearly all cells. It persists today in pathways such as glycolysis and fermentation, living relics of a primordial world [1-4].

Glycolysis breaks down glucose into pyruvate through a series of reactions that occur in the cytoplasm. As carbon atoms are oxidized, electrons are passed to NAD⁺, forming NADH — an early electron carrier. This small parade of electrons releases modest but crucial bursts of energy, captured as two ATP molecules [1,3,4]. Fermentation then returns electrons from NADH back onto pyruvate or its derivatives, recycling NAD⁺ and allowing glycolysis to continue. This was life's first internal redox system — a closed loop of carbon reshaping and electron flow, contained within the cell, enabling cells to process organic molecules and store chemical energy more efficiently [1,3,4]. It underscores the ancient, universal role of electrons in metabolism: the ceaseless passage of charge that fuelled life's earliest ambitions [3,4].

This was metabolism in its most rudimentary form: electrons circulating within the cell, ATP serving as their tangible expression, and carbon skeletons acting as both fuel and scaffold. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for all later innovations, setting the stage for ever more elaborate architectures of charge and flow [1-4].

The electron transport chain and the rise of respiration

The true energetic revolution in biology began when life learned to extract vastly more energy from its fuel through oxidative phosphorylation — a process orchestrated around the electron transport chain (ETC) [21,22]. Unlike fermentation and glycolysis, which operated within the loose chemistry of the cytoplasm, the ETC was an evolutionary marvel embedded in cell membranes [1,2,21]. It transformed energy capture from a local chemical shuffle into a spatially organized electrical system, capable of sustaining far greater energy yields [1,2,22].

This leap was enabled by membrane-bound proteins that could shuttle electrons from high-energy donors, such as hydrogen or NADH, to low-energy acceptors like sulphur, iron, and, much later, oxygen [21-23]. Each careful handoff released energy in controlled steps, harnessed to pump protons across the membrane into the periplasmic space, creating a chemiosmotic force—an electrochemical gradient between the cell's inner and outer worlds [1,2,21].

Here, we see electrons not simply moving but choreographing matter around them, shaping membranes into charged canvases that could store potential energy like water behind a dam [1,2]. The protons rushed back in, flooding through ATP synthase, a molecular turbine nestled in the membrane. As they poured past, the enzyme's rotary core spun like a tiny butter churn, mechanically coupling the flow of electrons and protons to the phosphorylation of ADP with phosphate, forging ATP in elegant cycles [1-3]. This was oxidative phosphorylation: a stunning molecular mechanism that turned the ancient cascade of electrons into a high-efficiency chemical exchange [1-3].

Glycolysis and fermentation enabled early cells to extract small yet vital amounts of energy from glucose or similar sugars in an anaerobic environment. They have persisted across billions of years as living relics of life’s oldest metabolic know-how [1,3]. The appearance of the electron transport chain (ETC) was nothing short of revolutionary. It was a transformative milestone that not only powered cells but also redefined what life could be and how far it could go [21,22]. It emerged when cells learned to harness redox reactions across membranes, using electron carriers and proton gradients to generate ATP more efficiently. Initially anaerobic and reliant on compounds like sulphur or iron, ETC adapted to use oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor, triggering a massive leap in energy yield. It was a triumph of bioengineering that would fuel and sustain life’s growing hunger for change [21,23].

The mitochondrial deal: power through partnership

In those first millennia of life, there were no ferns or ancient trees to leave fossils, nor animals to press prints in the mud. All that lay beneath volcanic skies were simple, single-celled organisms, much like modern-day bacteria. Alongside them, another group — the Archaea — so similar in form that for ages they were thought to be the same, together made up the earliest domains of life, the prokaryotes [24,25]. For more than four billion years, they have dominated the Earth's biosphere, thriving in oceans, soils, and arctic wastes, accounting for nearly 99% of all living cells [24,25].

They did well, but we might still wonder how the simmering of such a bland brew ever gave rise to the lavish spectacle of life as we know it. How did this broth congeal, then froth up into shapes so extravagant that our ancestors could eventually bubble to the surface? [25,26].

The answer was not just a matter of small things getting bigger, or of simple forms becoming more arabesque. It was something far more radical — a daring reorganization of life’s energetic scaffolding, driven once again by the demand for ever more elaborate corridors through which electrons could flow [21-23].

The emergence of the eukaryotic cell, approximately 1.5 to 2 billion years ago, has been regarded as one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth [26,27]. When the eukaryotes awoke, so too did everything else. The fossil record suddenly sprouted arms and legs, snouts and trunks, a festival of shape and form that would fill the pot to the brim. Everything we see today — every animal and plant, all the myriad diversity of life that has ever lived — can trace its exuberance to this one sentinel event [26-28].

Lynn Margulis, a biologist in the 1960s, argued that eukaryotes were as avant-garde to their primal pond-mates as song is to stutter. They were not merely the froth of a pot stirred harder; they were something else entirely — something epicurean and impetuous from which a domain of life arose that not only put meat to the broth but created a wholly new and lavish menu rich with newfound flavour [27,28]. She said the rise of the Eukaryote was not an eventuality or an inevitability that would arise if given enough time; it was a dalliance daring with disaster, an apocalyptic ingestion no less antagonizing than the scraping of continental plates – it was quite simply put – the eating of one by the other where miraculously, both lived on to tell the tale [27,28].

What resulted was a revolution. The internalization of energy supply, where the one swallowed brought its electron transport chains to the host, unleashing torrents of ATP that would bankroll an energetic dowry to fund all of evolution’s coming luxuries — larger genomes, protein synthesis, multicellularity, and the extravagances of complex organic life [21,23,26-28].

Tyranny of size

Until then, cells were limited by size. The ETC had made new life possible, but like pots crowded along a windowsill, there were only so many that could fit. To have more, a cell would have to become bigger, but to do so meant changes in volume that outstripped any increase in its surface area. The bigger they became, the greater the relative volume and like a mouth hungry and pleading to be fed, the appetite of size wailed louder 9 [27,28].

Margulis was the first to propose a solution. Endosymbiosis was not, she said, a stepwise improvement, but a radical reimagining of life — an Archaeal host and an itinerant bacterium that aligned with each other's needs and, somehow, managed to merge, crafting from their pot an extraordinary feast [27].

When the bacterial guest was enveloped within its host's abode, it remained intact, swathed in the trim attire of its membrane and the vacuole that engulfed it, making it now ever more efficient at generating surface gradients to power respiration [27-29]. It stepped through the door, flung its hat to a hook and fluffed the cushions for a comfy reprise. The lights were on and the music pumping. All the resources it needed were delivered straight to its door. It adapted quickly, unpacking its baskets and shedding what was no longer needed. Much of this was DNA, vital to life and function, but pernickety when it came to cleaning. By handing much of this over to the host, who was happy to pick up the laundry, it became less fettered with trivialities. Over time, it grew lean and svelte, able to focus solely on producing energy with effervescent success. It became a powerhouse, generating an abundance of ATP that spilled over to its host like light through a window [21,23,28,29].

The host was now basking. It was imbued with new abundance, its coffers filled fiscally with ATP that swilled like gravy from a plate. The more it was given, the less it needed to make. Its cell wall, once dedicated solely to energy production, was freed for other things. It could unfurl and furnish new embellishments — cilia to sweep, flagella to propel, pseudopodia to stretch and grasp. It could touch, sense, and respond to its environment [28,29]. Every new apparition endowed the cell with greater audacity to grow and explore, to thrive and survive in a self that was no longer stifled by size or fettered scarcity [28,29].

True complexity was becoming possible. Its genome, like a washing line strung with laundry, expanded. It pegged to it fragments of DNA discarded by its guests and made room for more by sweeping the environment around it [28,29]. Larger genomes enabled more elaborate instructions and designs to build. It acquired organelles and skeletons, specialized proteins and enzymes to get things done, and compartments to keep the household tidy. Freed from geometry, cells could expand and experiment, grow and contrive and eventually, embrace the permutations of multicellularity and gender, sex and complex structure [28-30].

Maleficence

But, as can happen with relationships, living together isn't always a bed of bliss. The sheets get ruffled, and the morning joy of waking to a gifted coffee turns to the snore of a lover still sleeping. Problems arise - a headache, a creaking bed - and soon enough, our blushing newlyweds find things amiss [28,29].

For the mitochondrion, the problem was not one of being but of what it does—a nuisance as bothersome as a stone in your shoe—and despite the mighty roar of its engine, patience would soon wear thin. The problem was like a flurry of hands cracking eggs for dinner; mistakes are bound to happen. In the ETC, where millions of electrons jump from one complex to another each second, some inevitably stray [1-3]. A pass is dropped, a catch fumbled, and wayward electrons scatter like gravel sprayed from a spinning tyre. Soon enough, they bind with oxygen to form free radicals, volatile molecules as unruly as revellers at a weekend bash, bound for mayhem [30,31]. Off they fly, breaking windows and doors and toppling all in their way.

A disaster is set in motion! Within the mitochondria, they disrupt membranes, proteins, and the DNA of its scattered genome, leaving it less able to function efficiently. Unable to repair or replicate, it falters and, like a bride who has lost her blossom, it wilts and dies [30,31].

For the host, it seems a bitter ending. This had been, after all, a welcome alliance, a deal for better or worse, though surely it had hoped for less of the latter [28,30]. But moan as it might, it was libertine and, with other wives still wed to its boudoir, it had enough to keep the bed warm until these too, like autumn leaves blowing, fall foul from a branch left bare. Eventually, with too few left to pay its bills, the host found itself wilting under an ever-growing debt. With extensions added, and the cost of organelles and appendages still pending, it was left with too little wherewithal to make ends meet [28,30,31].

Add to this the fury of free radicals, whose mad foray was far from over. Not content to stay in the mitochondria, they spread like stains on a napkin, reeking damage to the host with reckless abandon - proteins cleaved, organelles and membranes destroyed, and DNA unravelled into useless threads – relentlessly, inexorably, the host was torn apart [30,31].

What could it do? It might walk out—after all, many a romance ends with a one-night stand. But that wasn’t going to be easy. The host had grown used to its partner. It had fattened at the waist, and its home, laden with bling, was a prize too good to surrender. Like it or not, it had bills to pay and needed mitochondria to do so [28,29]. A truce had to be found. Given that free radicals were inevitable, much like a motor’s exhaust, the host began to repair itself more diligently. It found ways to restore damaged organelles and lipid membranes. It started to sweep the spaces around it, gathering fragments of DNA, like scattered morsels, to replace those of its own that were damaged [30,31]. It found benefit in staying close to other cells. What may have begun as huddling, cells clustered closely, much like a choir of carollers pressing tight on a chilly night. In this way, cells could hide or find safe shelter, sharing resources more effectively. When one cell died, others nearby could scavenge what was emptied of its cache to fill their own [28,29].

Over many hundreds of millions of years, colonies like this evolved beyond separate cells; they merged, forming single, coordinated organisms composed of many smaller parts bound together into a cohesive whole—multicellular life was born [28,29,32]. This fostered nuance and daring, as well as unparalleled experiments in shape and design. Organisms became more complex, organized, and better able to adapt to changing environments. Perhaps as a twist of fate, free radicals, with their errant electrons in tow, were repurposed by apoptosis to control cell growth and death. They became essential for shaping tissues and organs during growth and embryogenesis [30,32].

Until then, cell division had been utilitarian, an asexual, mitotic splitting of a cell into two halves that was functional but dull. With the rise of multicellularity, adventure beckoned, and new strategies emerged. Sexual reproduction mixed and matched genomes from two parents, opening the door to genetic diversity that was previously unimaginable [32,33]. It gave the ability to mix and match, to modify and strengthen DNA, giving offspring an expanded genetic toolkit capable of exploring new solutions and overcoming mutations caused by radicals or random error. This laid the foundation for adaptive evolution, enabling species to thrive in changing environments and ensuring the survival of future generations [32,33].

These were major evolutionary milestones. Endosymbiosis began with a loud hurrah. It seemed to come out of nowhere, startling life like a bolt of lightning, transforming simple prokaryotic cells into something extraordinary [27-29]. But it came with a cost – oxidative stress, the fumes of its engines burning, that inevitably, insidiously would cause wear and tear, and the cumulative deterioration of age and disability, disease, and death [30,31]. Were it not for this, however, and for the resilience and adaptation it provoked, life as we know it might never have evolved [28,29,32,33]. Every plant and animal, from dinosaurs to tumbling bumblebees, from palm fronds drenched in the rain to human beings fussing at work, all owe their existence to the ancient partnership between archaeal host and mitochondria, and ultimately, to the flow of electrons bridled within - energetic, catastrophic, and vitally essential [28-33].

Endosymbiosis and the internalization of the ETC weren't just a structural upgrade — they transformed life's energy economy (21,23,27-29). What became of it is written intimately in every plant and animal alive today, including us: a collaborative dependence that persists, in each of our cells, where countless mitochondria harbour within, each tirelessly shuttling electrons, doling out the means to pay the bills that make living possible (1-4,21,23,27-29).

Conclusion

From mud to muse

Long before DNA, before cells were enclosed by membranes and life began to take tentative shape, the Earth's crust churned with geochemical gradients. In the porous, mineral-lined walls of alkaline hydrothermal vents, electrons flowed from hydrogen to carbon dioxide, forming methane, acetate, and other organic molecules — not through design, but because this is what nature did. Then came boundaries: membranes that crafted gradients, molecules that shuttled electrons, and catalysts that coaxed reactions with growing finesse. Glycolysis emerged to tease energy from sugars; fermentation evolved to recycle electron carriers in the absence of oxygen. Over time, the electron transport chain took shape — a masterpiece of molecular engineering that harnessed the energy of electrons to pump protons across membranes, creating a gradient that, in turn, would force them back, generating ATP from the kinetic energy of their return.

Life as we know it, in its multitude of forms and breathtaking precision, is not merely a parade of creatures built to eat. It is the improvisation of shape and size around ever more elegant and sophisticated corridors of electron flow. From the simplest redox reactions on iron-sulphide surfaces to the multi-organelle, multi-tissue orchestration within our bodies, the same elemental need persists: to keep electrons moving.

Each day, the average adult recycles an amount of ATP roughly equivalent to their entire body weight, driven by over 7 × 10²⁵ electrons streaming through the electron transport chains — a torrent matching unbelievably, the spectacle of more than 700,000 lightning bolts. This daily river of electrons could toast millions of slices of bread, keep a house full of lights aglow for days, or power a washing machine through hundreds of loads.

Consider the air we breathe. Oxygen is the final electron acceptor of the ETC. Over a single day, we will take a staggering 23,000 breaths, consuming nearly 7,000 litres of air to supply the oxygen it needs; that's more than enough to fill a party with balloons. If that seems too hard to fathom, try holding your breath and see how long before you gasp – so great is that demand.

At birth, we arrive laden with mitochondria woven into the substance of our being. For the average baby, nearly 700 grams, or one-fifth of its weight, is made up by the mitochondria stacked within each of its trillion or so cells. That's about the same as what a placenta weighs, and almost as heavy as half a loaf of bread. So, there we have it – the answer to our question: What do an underwater cavern, sex and half a loaf of bread have in common? Mitochondria and the miracle of millions of electrons they shuffle every second, a pulse begun billions of years ago, still flowing within us. This is life: biology wrapped around the unassailable motion of electrons - empowering, destroying, evoking - the infinitesimal glitter that kindles life and the unfathomable grandeur of being.

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