Читать книгу Vitals - Greg Bear - Страница 4

Our bodies are made of cells. Mitochondria are the parts of our cells that generate the energy-rich molecules we use every instant of our lives.

Billions of years ago, mitochondria were bacterial invaders, parasites of early cells. They joined forces with their hosts; now they are essential.

‘My mitochondria compose a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a large, motile colony of bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons, for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.’

– Lewis Thomas, ‘Organelles as Organism’, 1974

‘We love Comrade Stalin more than Mommy and Daddy. May Comrade Stalin live to be one hundred! No, two hundred! No, three hundred!’

– Song sung by Soviet children, early 1950s

Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;

You’ve played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill:

Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age

Comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage:

Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease,

Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.

Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace