SOLVING BIOLOGY’S MYSTERIES USING
QUANTUM MECHANICS
There’s a fine line between being hailed as a visionary
and being denounced as a crank, as Iraq-born physicist
Jim Al-Khalili is only too aware. Seated in his office at the
University of Surrey in the U.K. on a sunny day, he recalls
a less tranquil time in his career, almost 15 years ago.
Back then, he and his Surrey colleague, biologist Johnjoe
McFadden, explored a strange mechanism to explain
how DNA — the molecule that carries our genetic code
— may mutate.
at the time, their paper was one of the first in the now
burgeoning field of quantum biology. The strange rules
that control the subatomic world might be unintuitive,
but they have been verified through many experiments
for the better part of a century. Yet it is only in the past
Their theory caused a stir because it invoked quantum
mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the
behavior of particles in the subatomic realm. Their idea
gave some insight into the origins of genetic mutations,
which over the centuries have given rise to the variety of
species in the biological kingdom, and in the short term
can lead to the development of diseases like cancer. The
proposal was scoffed at, however, sparking incredulity
from both biologists and physicists because quantum
effects supposedly hold sway only on the smallest scales
and cannot govern large biological molecules.
“Senior colleagues in physics warned me off this line of
research, saying, ‘This isn’t just speculative, it’s wacky,’
” Al-Khalili says. “I have since realized that some of
the best ideas come out of seemingly crazy thoughts,
because otherwise they wouldn’t be new.”
Though Al-Khalili and McFadden did not label it as such
decade or so that a small but dedicated band of physicists
and biologists has found hints that nature may also use
these rules to enhance the efficiency of biological tasks.
If true, then physicists struggling to innovate in the lab
could take a quantum leaf out of nature’s book and learn
how to devise better machines. Even more ambitiously —
and controversially — some argue that quantum biology
could be a game-changer in treating serious diseases.
“The holy grail is to find that quantum effects stimulate
biological processes that are relevant to medicine,” says
Al-Khalili. “Looking to the long term, if these effects
underlie the mechanism of DNA mutations, that could
allow for real progress in the treatment of cancer.”
Reference:
Merali, Z. (2014, December 29). Solving Biology’s
Mysteries Using Quantum Mechanics. Retrived
from arihinde Discover Magazine: http://
discovermagazine.com/2014/dec/17-this-quantumlife
on May 10, 2017
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