The Quantum Underpinnings of Life

Orateur : Johnjoe McFADDEN (University of Surrey, UK - Professor of Molecular Genetics, Associate Dean (International) - BSc (Biochemistry), PhD (Biochemistry))

Quantum mechanics and molecular biology were the two revolutionary scientific disciplines that grew out of the twentieth century. Quantum biology can be said to have been initiated by a physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, in his lecture, essay and book entitled “What in Life” (published in 1944) in which he proposed that heredity was based on non-trivial aspects of quantum mechanics. The book was very influential to molecular biology pioneers, such as James Watson and Francis Crick, who speculated that quantum tunnelling may be the driver for mutation in DNA. This idea was given a firm theoretical foundation by the Swedish physicist Per-Olov Löwdin in the 1960’s ; but thereafter the field of quantum biology largely languished ; albeit with occasional bursts of interest, such as the speculation that consciousness is based on quantum mechanics, stimulated by Roger Penrose’s book, “The Emperor’s New Mind” in 1989. However, the twenty-first century has seen a revival of quantum biology with the arrival of new experimental evidence of quantum mechanical effects in a range of biological phenomena such as photosynthesis and enzyme action. In this talk I will provide an introduction to quantum biology, returning to Schrödinger’s original insight that quantum phenomena may be found in biological processes that involve very small numbers of molecules. I will review the kinds of biological phenomena that may be subject to these quantum stochastic effects and present some recent experimental evidence that proton tunnelling is involved in mutation as well as highlighting areas for future research.

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