Mitochondria

An ostrich egg may be considered a single living cell. Big, too, is a single nerve cell which runs along an elephant's spine. The structure of these monster cells is practically the same as a microscopic cell in a rabbit's liver, of which some 980 are required to span one inch.

All such cells contain a small spherical body called a nucleus, surrounded by a soft, jelly-like material called cytoplasm. Dotting the cytoplasm are tiny granules called mitochondria, whose function in life has been a mystery to physiologists.

Last week Professor James Walter Wilson, 39, of Brown University uttered a glad cry. He had, he believed, discovered that at least one use for mitochondria is to breathe for their cells.

To make his discovery, Dr. Wilson rigged up a perfusion pump analogous to the artificial heart which Charles Augustus Lindbergh designed for his admiring friend Dr. Alexis Carrel. To his pump Dr. Wilson hitched rabbit kidney after rabbit kidney, and through them perfused artificial blood composed of salt water, red corpuscles from beef blood and oxygen. Upon adding potassium cyanide, which displaces oxygen, Dr. Wilson through his microscope could see oxygen-starved mitochondria crumble while cells of the kidneys, and finally the entire kidneys died.

When he gave the kidneys artificial fevers, they increased their absorption of oxygen until temperatures reached the equivalent of 107DEG in human beings. When a sick man's temperature reaches that height, his kidneys usually cease to function and he sinks into a coma. Autopsy usually discloses his kidneys damaged. That the damage begins with overexertion of mitochondria in the kidney cells seemed probable last week when Dr. Wilson reported that at the equivalent of 107DEG fever, rabbit kidney mitochondria suddenly shattered.

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