There's this book. Sequel to Wrinkle in Time i think. Where this kid brings up the subject of mitochondria in class. Gets pummeled for it.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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This has got to be the funniest summary of A Wind in the Door
Same here in Germany - immediately came to my mind!
What's interesting to me about that phrase is that no one uses the word "powerhouse" for anything else any more, except maybe to call something powerful.
Since it's not the 1920s any more and we have an electrical grid and centralized power generation. We still sometimes do use temporary off-grid generators, but we no longer have any need for a dedicated word that means "building or shed that we keep our generators in".
The power generating stations near me are still called Power houses.
Power plant🌱
Yes, that's the word that everyone uses for the large generating stations that create power on a large scale like a manufacturing plant creates goods on a large scale.
Its rare for us to have "power houses" now, and when we do no one calls them that.
Mitochondria is the solar farm of the cell.
it's at this point a joke seen in non science contexts
Lmao I was watching an episode of ST: Voyager the other day and a little girl learning about mitochondria said they were the "warp core of the cell". That phrase is ridiculously pervasive
I don't know. Wouldn't that mean cells could violently explode and cause a chain reaction if nearby cells exploding as well?
What's with americans and mitochondria ?
The phrase "Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" was coined in a 1957 article by biologist Philip Siekevitz. It apparently rattled around in the English lexicon until 2013, when a tumblr user by the handle apatheticghost posted the following:
what I learned in school
I am a fucking piece of shit
everybody else is also a piece of shit
mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
This blew up in popularity and variations emerged that replaced the first two items with various social commentary, but always kept the mitochondria line. It stood for a kind of universal frustration students have with school, that a lot of the curriculum feels like memorizing game show trivia answers rather than useful or practical skills applicable to adult life. Loads of us have no idea how the tax system works but we can all parrot biology factoids.
The phrase became one of those catchphrase in-jokes. A bit like how you can't say 69 without saying "nice" anymore.
My on personal Mandela Effect: I'd swear I'm from the parallel universe where the phrase comes from the Bill Nye The Science Guy theme song, but apparently I'm thinking of "Inertia is a property of matter."
Thanks for the detailed answer !
Our politicians of a Sithian persuasion want to use Force Lightning on their enemies and subjects. Sadly(?), mitochondria are not quite the same as midi-chlorians.
It's been so ubiquitous for so long that I honestly don't know where it came from. But most of the time when I hear "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" it's being used to take a jab at how impractical our education system is, as though to say, "instead of teaching me about X, they taught me about the mitochondria"
Mitochondria are cool and important.
Hard agree, they are the powerhouse of the cell after all. But also teaching kids how to do things like cook, handle money, and participate in their local government would be more universally applicable.
Those are taught in home ec and social science class. How are they supposed to teach you about local government in biology?
But I'd like to have learned actual practical information as well. Not once has mitochondria come up other than as a meme, but knowing how local and national government works might have been more useful. If it wasn't on the state standardized test, it wasn't taught at my schools.
Compound interest.
Finances are taught poorly everywhere tbf. I was lucky with my precalculus teacher being a huge finance nerd, she spent at least 3 separate full class sessions going over credit cards and loans completely unrelated to our content at the time
Understanding the building blocks of life is very important. This is the foundation of how your body processes energy. If you want to lose weight, for example, you should understand respiration.
Reread my comment, I ALSO wanted to learn info more useful to every day life. I never said instead of.
Grew up in Asia. Only moved to the US for undergrad... And this applies. So it's not just the Americans methinks.
That's interesting
We don't have that where I live, sure we had to learn the organelles of a cell, but there was no über-focusing on the mitochondria.
(Btw I didn't know about "methinks". Learned a new word, thanks !)
Methinks you have to use the phrase, "methinks" more often!