Quantum Biology

I would like to introduce you to an emerging area of science, one that is still speculative but hugely exciting, and certainly one that growing very rapidly. Quantum biology asks a very simple question. Does quantum mechanics that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of subatomic world of atoms and molecules that underpin so much of modern physics and chemistry also play a role inside a living cell? 

Now quantum biology is isn't new, its been around since the early 1930s. But it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments in biochemistry labs using spectroscopy have shown very clear, firm evidence that there are some certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them.

Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemist, molecular biochemist, it's a very interdisciplinary field. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niel Bohr, said If you are not astonished by it, then haven't understood it. 

Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. It is a set of powerful and beautiful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small. It's a world very different from everyday world, made up of trillions of atoms. It's a world built on probability  and chance. It's a fuzzy world.

Quantum biology isn't this obvious. Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. Quantum biology is about looking for non-trivial, the counterintuitive ideas in quantum mechanics and to see if they do, indeed, play an important role in describing the process of life.

At the molecular level, living organisms have certain order, a structure to them that's very different from the random thermodynamics jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity.

In fact, living matter seems to behave in this order, in a structure, just like inanimate matter cooled down to absolute zero, where quantum effect play a very important role. There's something special about the structure(the order) inside a living cell.

So,Schrodinger speculated that may be that may be quantum mechanics plays a role in life. It's a very speculative far reaching idea, and it didn't really go very far. But as I mentioned in a start, in last 10 years, there have been experiments emerging, showing where some of these certain phenomenon in biology do seems to require quantum mechanics.

There is one of the phenomenon of quantum mechanics which is know as quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling is the phenomenon in which electron or any other subatomic particle disappear from one side of potential barrier and than appears on the other side.

Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place inside living cells. Enzymes, those workhorses of life the catalysts of chemical reactions enzymes of biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells, by many, many order of magnitude.

It's always been a mystery how they do this. Well it was discovered that enzymes have evolved to make use of is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via quantum tunneling. It's efficient, it's fast it can disappear, a proton can disappear from one place, and reappear on the other.