Word: mitochondria
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...another. Bacteria swap genes inside our bodies, evolving resistance to antibiotics in our own gut. Some 2 billion years ago, one of our single-celled ancestors took in an oxygen-consuming bacterium. That microbe became the thousands of tiny sacs found in each of our cells today, known as mitochondria, that let us breathe oxygen. When genes move this way, it's as if two branches of the tree of life are being grafted together...
George Palade, a pioneer in cell biology, won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in isolating and identifying cell structure. His research, which he conducted along with biologists Albert Claude and Christian de Duve, used electron microscopy to identify the functions of mitochondria (the powerhouse of a cell) and ribosomes (proteinmakers), as well as other cell components. Having emigrated from Romania in 1946, Palade became chairman of the cell-biology department at Yale in 1973 and then the founding dean of scientific affairs at the University of California at San Diego...
...mysteriously veered off the road and crashed into a telephone pole, and that she is now brain dead. From here the story unfolds backward, and clues reveal that something sinister took an interest in Kiyomi and Toshiaki long ago. We learn that Kiyomi attended a lecture on mitochondria as a university student and became bizarrely agitated when images of the organelles were shown ("too enraptured to notice that she was panting like a dog"). She was a girl "whose heart thrilled to mitochondria," but never guessed why this was so. That was probably for the best, since poor Kiyomi turns...
...Toshiaki is also central to their plans. When he tells Kiyomi that his article on mitochondria has been accepted by Nature, the mitochondria speak through her: "I knew you were the one I've been looking for." After Kiyomi dies, the grief-stricken Toshiaki hits on the creepy plan to keep a bit of her alive by culturing her liver cells. His obsessive love of his wife and his science blind him to the strangeness of what he's doing. But the mitochondria see a perfect opportunity and rejoice. They will harness his expertise in biotechnology to conquer the world...
...Sena was a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Tohoku University in the northern Japanese city of Sendai when he wrote Parasite Eve, his first published novel and the recipient of the first Japan Horror Novel Prize. The book was partly inspired by mitochondria research he was pursuing at the time. He also felt encouraged by the way in which the public's imagination had been gripped by the "African Eve" hypothesis (which argues that we are descended from an ancient African woman whose mitochondrial DNA we all share...