Organelles: Episode I

As you may have heard, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell! This is a phrase commonly mentioned in introductory biology textbooks and reiterated throughout our lives in an effort to prove that we do, in fact, remember something from high school biology. The first published manuscript to announce this was written by Dr. Philip Siekevitz and published in the Scientific American in 1957. It’s a short review with multiple images taken an electron microscope to confirm Dr. Siekevitz statement that the mitochondria’s form mirrors its function. However, research on mitochondria began almost exactly a century before this powerhouse statement was made…