Nick Lane
British biochemist and writerWikipedia
18
MENTIONS
8
EPISODES
8
PODCASTS
Search complete. 18 mentions across 8 episodes found for "Nick Lane".
Sep 21, 2026
Paul HérouxGUEST
So you don't have a basis in cell biology?
Ryan AndersonHOST
No, but I've talked to a lot of them, like Nick Lane and Michael Levin, but I'm just an abstract learner.
Ryan AndersonHOST
I love being
Paul HérouxGUEST
curious.
Paul HérouxGUEST
You know what Nick Lane says? He says about this process of generating ATP called oxidative phosphorylation, he says...
Paul HérouxGUEST
Perturb this process at your own risk.
Paul HérouxGUEST
And you have to take that very, very seriously because the risk that Nick Lang is talking about is the basis for all the problems that we're experiencing.
Valerie VeachGUEST
I think that like it's, um, the, the-
David GerardHOST
I mean, there are still academics who take Nick Lane seriously, you know
Valerie VeachGUEST
... people who espouse these ideas.
Valerie VeachGUEST
100%.
Andrew HanHOST
I was astounded by some of the depth of the research and sort of the startling conclusions that had come out.
Andrew HanHOST
And then more recently, I've read a book, and I have it right here, Nick Lane, The Vital Question, which I think we'll probably reference again, which really, I think, suggests that mitochondria and how they work in our cells is sort of the the crux to the question of like, what is life and how does it work? 100%.
Andrew HanHOST
So
Gordon FreedmanGUEST
some people will remember this, that there were two sort of cell types in the early, early Earth.
Gordon FreedmanGUEST
So we're not using CRISPR and so forth.
Gordon FreedmanGUEST
It's still a field that's being looked at deeply, but it's been very hard to intervene in how the mitochondria operates and how it operates at a genetic level.
Andrew HanHOST
Yeah, and so after reading Nick Lane's The Vital Question, my understanding is that many of the genes that once resided in the mitochondrial genome have migrated to the nuclear genome.
Andrew HanHOST
How good is our understanding of how the two different genomes are interacting to produce functional or dysfunctional mitochondria?
ElleHOST
It's always, like, finance or something to that effect.
ElleHOST
Um, and th- this time the book is Life Ascending by Nick Lane.
ElleHOST
It's about the major, um, it, it's called, uh, I think the subtitle is something like Inventions by Evolution, but it's, like, basically each chapter is devoted to a huge leap forward in evolution, um, that led to kind of life, uh, existing as we know it on Earth today.
ElleHOST
Um-
Jack KruseGUEST
And when this is blocked, you face a, a severe, uh, free radical famine inside the matrix.
Jack KruseGUEST
This is why I said to you in the beginning of this story that diabetics have a lack of superoxide to generate the current along the inner mitochondrial membrane, and you know that current from previous podcasts we talked about, is about thirty million volts if you believe, you know, the work of, uh, Nick Lane.
Jack KruseGUEST
So let's talk about the consequences now of superoxide loss of signal.
Jack KruseGUEST
First one, okay? You lose mitoception, meaning the mitochondria no longer can send out proper signals to the genome.
24 MINS LATER
Jack KruseGUEST
Okay? So this means that the mitochondria in our body is like a magnetic bus.
Jack KruseGUEST
Okay? And it turns out that these exact subatomic mechanisms behind how a cell works, when a tissue, like say your kidney, your liver, or something else, gets this Marcus inversion, the cell response is to make a desperate attempt to raise its voltage on the inner mitochondrial membrane.
Jack KruseGUEST
This is Nick Lane's idea, thirty million volts.
Jack KruseGUEST
Well, it turns out we can go to forty million volts when we have a Marcus inversion.
Jessamyn FairfieldPANELIST
Like there are lots of gates to get us where we are that are highly unlikely.
Jessamyn FairfieldPANELIST
The one that always comes to me is, I think it was Nick Lane originally said it to us, but the possibility of multicellular life only happened once and it seems to have been an archaea just jumped into a bacteria and kablamo, you've got like multi-cell.
Jessamyn FairfieldPANELIST
So it happened once.
Jessamyn FairfieldPANELIST
So maybe it's so outrageously unlikely, you know, the odds are 1 in 25 trillion.
Ziad K. DahhajiGUEST
And so considering that when you start to shrink down the scale in reality, a lot of these inputs become exponentially more powerful.
Ziad K. DahhajiGUEST
And so I think it was the work of Dr. Nick Lane who talks about how the voltage of the inner mitochondrial membrane, I think it's like 150 to 170 millivolts, seems insignificant from the outside.
Ziad K. DahhajiGUEST
But when you shrink down to that scale, the nanoscale or the quantum scale, whatever it is, that from what he says translates into essentially a bolt of lightning.
Ziad K. DahhajiGUEST
You have lightning inside your body, according
Thomas P. SeagerHOST
to Nick Lane.
Thomas P. SeagerHOST
And when I get out of the ice bath, I feel that way.
Thomas P. SeagerHOST
So he must be right.
Thomas P. SeagerHOST
They're ultra weak if you compare them to the sun.
Mihaela UlieruHOST
And he very kindly gave me some pointers and said, well, I think you need to be speaking with Mike Levin
Anthony FinbowGUEST
and Nick Lane and We collectively are working on a model trying to understand the dynamical causal model of the mitochondrion.
Anthony FinbowGUEST
It looks like you've got a model.
Anthony FinbowGUEST
You know, you should engage with the other two researchers.
42 MINS LATER
Anthony FinbowGUEST
They're looking orders of scale down from where I am building the system model.
Anthony FinbowGUEST
But I've been tremendously excited by the work that they've done.
Anthony FinbowGUEST
Jeffrey Guy put the Guy Foundation together and he's backing his backed research programs by Mike and by Nick Lane, who really, you know, with his work, most incredibly titled work on the mitochondrion which i read at the beginning of my effort power sex and suicide really sort of described in the most compelling way the system that i've spent the last two and a half years from a computational perspective trying to characterize so i think all of those things together with the requirement for us to move to a different computational paradigm that doesn't ignore energy and it doesn't violate the constraint which is provide as much energy as is necessary in order to compute, but rather utilizes compute resource availability as part of the computational program.
Anthony FinbowGUEST
That, I think, charts a pathway beyond the current... scale is all you need, LLM, local minimum is how I describe it, towards a more compelling future.