Imagine using your mobile phone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and diseases. It seems like the figment of an overly optimistic science fiction writer’s imagination. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.
Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly smaller scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. However, it is not yet fully understood to what extent quantum effects affect living systems.
Quantum effects are events that occur between atoms and molecules and cannot be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, such as Newton’s laws of motion, break down on the atomic scale. Instead, small objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.
To people who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or the world visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things happen in the quantum world that you might not expect, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing unharmed on the other side, or being in two different places at once in a phenomenon called superposition.
I trained as a quantum engineer. Research in quantum mechanics is generally technology-oriented. However, surprisingly, there is growing evidence that nature, an engineer with billions of years of experience, has learned how to use quantum mechanics to work at its best. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. This also means that we can possibly control physiological processes using the quantum properties of biological matter.
Quantity is probably real in biology
Researchers can manipulate quantum events to create better technology. In fact, you already live in a quantum-powered world: From laser pointers to GPS to magnetic resonance imaging to the transistors in your computer, all these technologies rely on quantum effects.
In general, quantum effects occur only at very small length and mass scales or when temperatures approach absolute zero. This is because quantum objects such as atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they interact with each other and their environment in an uncontrolled way. In other words, a macroscopic collection of quantum objects is better described by the laws of classical mechanics. Anything that initiates a quantum dies classically. For example, an electron can be directed to be in two places at once, but will soon end up in only one place; As classically expected.
In a complex, noisy biological system, most quantum effects would be expected to quickly dissipate in what physicist Erwin Schrödinger called “the warm, wet environment of the cell.” According to most physicists, the fact that the living world operates at high temperatures and in complex environments means that biology can be adequately and completely described by classical physics: no interesting barrier crossings, no ubiquity.
But chemists have long been begging to differ on this matter. Studies of fundamental chemical reactions at room temperature clearly show that processes occurring in biomolecules such as proteins and genetic material are the result of quantum effects. Importantly, such nanoscopic, short-lived quantum effects are consistent with driving some of the macroscopic physiological processes that biologists measure in living cells and organisms. Research shows that quantum effects affect biological functions, including regulation of enzyme activity, sensing of magnetic fields, cell metabolism, and electron transport in biomolecules.
How to study quantum biology
The exciting possibility that subtle quantum effects could alter biological processes poses both an exciting frontier and a challenge for scientists. Studying quantum mechanical effects in biology requires tools that can measure short time scales, small length scales, and subtle differences in quantum states that lead to physiological changes; all of these are integrated into a traditional wet lab environment.
In my work, I develop tools to study and control the quantum properties of small things like electrons. Electrons have mass and charge, as well as a quantum property called spin. Spin describes how electrons interact with a magnetic field, just as charge describes how electrons interact with an electric field. The quantum experiments I have created since graduate school and now in my own laboratory aim to apply specific magnetic fields to change the spins of specific electrons.
Research has shown that many physiological processes are affected by weak magnetic fields. These processes include stem cell development and maturation, cell proliferation rates, genetic material repair, and countless more. These physiological responses to magnetic fields are consistent with chemical reactions that depend on the spin of specific electrons in molecules. Applying a weak magnetic field to alter electron spins can thus effectively control the end products of a chemical reaction, with significant physiological consequences.
Currently, a lack of understanding of how such processes work at the nanoscale prevents researchers from determining exactly at what strength and frequency magnetic fields cause specific chemical reactions in cells. Current cell phone, wearable, and miniaturization technologies are already sufficient to produce personalized weak magnetic fields that alter physiology for both good and bad. So the missing piece of the puzzle is a “deterministic codebook” for how to map quantum causes to physiological consequences.
In the future, fine-tuning nature’s quantum properties could allow researchers to develop therapeutic devices that are non-invasive, remotely controlled, and accessible via mobile phone. Electromagnetic therapies could potentially be used to prevent and treat diseases such as brain tumors, as well as in biomanufacturing, such as increasing the production of laboratory-grown meat.
A whole new way to do science
Quantum biology is one of the most interdisciplinary fields to ever emerge. How do you build community and train scientists to work in this field?
Since the pandemic, my laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Surrey Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Center have held Grand Quantum Biology meetings to provide a weekly informal forum for researchers to meet and share expertise in areas such as mainstream quantum physics. , biophysics, medicine, chemistry and biology.
Research with potentially transformative implications for biology, medicine, and the physical sciences will require working within an equally transformative model of collaboration. Working in a combined laboratory will enable scientists from disciplines that take very different approaches to research to conduct experiments that meet the breadth of quantum biology, from quantum to molecular, cellular to organismic.
The existence of quantum biology as a discipline implies that the traditional understanding of life processes is incomplete. Further research will lead to new perspectives on age-old questions such as what life is, how it can be controlled, and how we can learn from nature to create better quantum technologies.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and authoritative analysis to help you understand our complex world. Did you like this article? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
Written by: Clarice D. Aiello, University of California, Los Angeles.
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Clarice D. Aiello receives funding from NSF, ONR, IDOR Foundation, Faggin Foundation, and Templeton Foundation.