Jared Rutter

Rutter suggests that scent-based detection of disease is plausible because differing metabolism produces different chemical compounds.

“when a person's doing different metabolism, they're going to be producing different chemicals in different proportions”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:55:47

Rutter criticizes the classification of cancers by anatomical site, noting some breast cancers resemble some liver cancers more than other breast cancers.

“there are some breast cancers that are more similar to some liver cancers than they are to other breast cancers”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:44:59

Rutter predicts that combinations of safe, specific drugs matched to a tumor's biochemistry could produce something approximating a cure, analogous to HIV triple therapy.

“it's going to be very hard for that tumor to become resistant to all of those drugs simultaneously. And as a result of that, that might result in something approximating a cure”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:40:12

Rutter frames the central challenge of cancer therapy as killing cancer cells, which are our own cells, without killing the rest of the body's cells.

“The challenge for us is to figure out a way to kill those cells which again are our cells, they are us, is to kill those cells without killing the rest of our cells”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:38:16

Rutter argues cancer undergoes the same evolutionary process as viruses but confined within a single host, with very little evidence that cancer is infectious.

“There's very little evidence that cancer is infectious”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 43:19

Rutter says imaging metabolism at cellular resolution inside a human body is a very difficult problem of both spatial resolution and finding a visible surrogate.

“I should be clear, that's a very difficult problem. The spatial resolution, the ability to see fine enough detail to make out individual cells are even smaller than that”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:50:56

Rutter states that in a normal human, roughly 70 to 80 percent of the energy extracted by heart muscle cells comes from fat.

“I think it's estimated 70% to 80% of the energy extraction that happens in cardiomyocytes and heart muscle cells is happening from fat”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:03:37

Rutter says cells continuously monitor their ATP levels and mount strong responses when energy is depleted.

“every cell, almost all cells know how much usable energy ATP they have all the time”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:00:50

Rutter frames pyruvate as a bifurcation point where food is either converted to energy or to biomass.

“Food can either be converted to energy. or it can be converted to biomass”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 33:53

Rutter argues that whole-body metabolism is the aggregate of the metabolism of each of roughly 30 trillion cells.

“The metabolism of our body is really the sum total of the metabolism of each one of our 30 trillion cells or so”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 3:19

Rutter says the MPC discovery required triangulating yeast, fly, and human cell data and could not have been made in any single model organism.

“we could not have made that discovery with any one type of organism. If we just had the yeast data, we wouldn't have figured it out”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:23:51

Rutter says his lab's motivation to study mitochondria was the realization that the functions of many mitochondrial proteins were unknown.

“the realization that many of the proteins that make up mitochondria, that do the stuff that mitochondria do, we don't know what their functions are”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 54:09

Rutter says the existence of a mitochondrial pyruvate carrier had been known for 60 or 70 years before the protein was identified.

“It's been known for 60 or 70 years that mitochondria must have a carrier to enable pyruvate to get in, but it was not identified what that protein was”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 53:25

Rutter cites work from Craig Thompson's group showing a single cell can contain two functionally distinct populations of mitochondria.

“in one cell, you can have two different kinds of mitochondria that have two different functions, and they're distinct in one cell”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 23:32

Rutter says mitochondria congregate at the leading edge of a crawling cell where ATP demand is highest.

“mitochondria will congregate at that leading edge where that ATP is being consumed to make ATP right there so it can be used”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 19:10

Rutter explains that because sperm cytoplasm does not enter the egg, mitochondrial DNA is inherited entirely from the mother.

“So the mitochondrial genome of you came completely from your mother. Mine came completely from my mother”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 16:23

Rutter argues cells burn fatty acids first because excess free fatty acids are acutely toxic, whereas excess glucose is toxic chronically.

“most cells, when they have fatty acids, will burn the fatty acids first, probably as a response to, hey, this could kill us”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:30:07

Rutter says lactate, long viewed as a waste product, is now known to be an important fuel that the heart readily burns.

“lactate is a very important fuel on its own. The heart, for example, is quite good at consuming lactate and burning it”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:26:13

Rutter says it is widely accepted that mitochondria carrying too much energy generate reactive oxygen species that damage DNA and proteins and may contribute to aging.

“when that mitochondria is overpowered, that leads to a state that is very susceptible to generation of these reactive species that end up damaging our genome”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:58:02

Rutter argues that mitochondria in cancer cells are not broken, contrary to Warburg's interpretation, but are very good at making biomass.

“it turns out that mitochondria and cancer cells are not broken. In fact, they're very, very good, not necessarily at making ATP, but at making stuff”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:35:13

Rutter reports that mice lacking MPC in the heart die of dilated heart failure not from ATP shortage but from misallocating resources toward growth.

“it's pretty clear that they don't die from an inability to make ATP. Because they can burn other things to make ATP”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 1:08:18

Rutter explains that FDG-PET detects cancer because tumors take up large amounts of glucose.

“So the reason we do FDG-PET is to see the cells where in the body is taking up a lot of glucose and tumors take up a lot of glucose”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 38:50

Rutter describes insulin as a signal telling adipocytes to take up glucose and convert it to fat for long-term storage.

“when they see insulin, what they do is they turn on a protein, they start making a protein that will cause glucose to be taken up into that adipocyte”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 27:55

Rutter argues that the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria is the only model scientists have good reason to believe and that complex life could not have arisen without it.

“I think that's the only model that I think any of us as scientists have any good reason to believe”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 10:32

Rutter says mitochondria almost universally become less energized and less effective with age, though the reasons remain largely unclear.

“it's almost... universally the case that mitochondria become less energized, less effective, let's say, as we age”

Huberman Lab: How Mitochondria Control Your Metabolism | Dr. Jared Rutter (Sep 7, 2026) · Listen from 6:36