The origins of quantum biology

In the paper

“The murky origins that motivated and sustained his interest in quantum biology are inextricably linked to his political sympathies with Nazi Germany and play an important role in explaining why the field did not flourish further after the war ended.”

In the paper

“For example, the German physicist Pascual Jordan published a book a year before Schrödinger's, entitled Physics and the Secret of Organic Life [20], in which he had posed the question ‘Sind die Gesetze der Atomphysik und Quantenphysik für die Lebensvorgänge von wesentlicher Bedeutung?’ (‘Are the laws of atomic and quantum physics of essential importance for life?’).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [20] Jordan P. 1941. Die Physik und das Geheimnis des organischen Lebens. Braunschweig, Germany: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“We will argue that some of the insights provided by these pioneering physicists remain relevant to our understanding of quantum biology today.”

• Also stated in: § 1. Introduction · plain

  “We will argue that some of the insights provided by a number of these physicists remain relevant to our understanding of quantum biology today.”

In the paper

“Quantum biology's origins are often traced back to 1944 and the publication of Erwin Schrödinger's famous book, What is Life? [19]. But even before this, several other quantum physicists had already made inroads into biology.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“In this, Schrödinger was essentially pinpointing the role of the randomizing influence of thermal motion, what we refer to today as ‘environmental decoherence’ [35], which is what separates the quantum from the classical world, an insight that is often traced back to the work of Dieter Zeh [36].”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [35] Zurek WH. 2003. Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical. Rev. Mod. Phys. 75, 715–775. ( 10.1103/RevModPhys.75.715) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source
• Not checked yetcites [36] Zeh HD. 1970. On the interpretation of measurement in quantum theory. Found. Phys. 1, 69–76. ( 10.1007/BF00708656) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“Jordan believed that living organisms were uniquely able to carry out this amplification in a way that was conspicuously different from inanimate matter, such as a Geiger counter.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [25] Jordan P. 1932. Die Quantenmechanik und die Grundprobleme der Biologie und Psychologie. Naturwissenschaften 20, 815–821. ( 10.1007/BF01494844) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“Schrödinger called this principle on which he claimed life depended ‘order from order’, arguing that ‘incredibly small groups of atoms, much too small to display exact statistical laws, do play a dominating role in the very orderly and lawful events within a living organism’ [19, p. 20].”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“His ideas influenced many other scientists, including the German physicist Pascual Jordan”

In the paper

“One of the early proponents of organicism was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who is generally accepted to have founded the interdisciplinary field called general systems theory, which has since been applied to everything from biology to cybernetics. His work is considered to be among the forerunners of systems biology. In his 1928 book Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (Critical Theory of Morphogenesis)”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [23] von Bertalanffy L. 1928. Kritische theorie der formbildung. Berlin, Germany: Gebrüder Borntraeger Verlagsbuchhandlung. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“However, by and large, most biologists continued to believe that life is adequately accounted for by all the familiar statistical laws of classical chemistry and physics.”

In the paper

“For example, the German-born British physicist Herbert Fröhlich proposed a theory in which quantum mechanical coherence, now known as Fröhlich coherence, plays an important role in biological systems [38--40]. A biological system that attains such a state of coherence is known as a Fröhlich condensate.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [38--40]

In the paper

“Theoretical and experimental approaches have also explored the role of proton tunnelling in the generation of DNA base tautomers [14].”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [14] Godbeer AD, Al-Khalili JS, Stevenson PD. 2015. Modelling proton tunnelling in the adenine-thymine base pair. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 17, 13034–13044. ( 10.1039/c5cp00472a) [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“He argued that biological organization was facilitated by coherent excited states at the molecular level, driven by the flow of energy provided by metabolic processes that generate molecular vibrations in terahertz range.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [38--40]

In the paper

“He even claimed that the concept of a single dictatorial leader (Führer), or guide, was a central principle of life:”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [25] Jordan P. 1932. Die Quantenmechanik und die Grundprobleme der Biologie und Psychologie. Naturwissenschaften 20, 815–821. ( 10.1007/BF01494844) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“Longuet-Higgins’s stance was very typical of the attitude towards quantum biology in the second half of the twentieth century, and, to a large extent, this scepticism was wholly justified.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [33] Longuet-Higgins HC. 1962. Quantum mechanics and biology. Biophys. J. 2, 207–215. ( 10.1016/S0006-3495(62)86957-4) [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“One such critic was Niels Bohr himself; and yet, as we shall see, it was Bohr's pessimism regarding the importance of quantum mechanics in unlocking the secrets of life that would, paradoxically, influence and inspire the men who would lay the foundations of quantum biology.”

In the paper

“Physicists similarly dismissed the possibility that quantum effects could play a role in biology, particularly as demonstrating them in inorganic physical systems required an extraordinary level of control that could only be achieved by maintaining systems at temperatures close to absolute zero in a vacuum and shielded from environmental perturbations.”

In the paper

“Therefore, it was expected that any delicate quantum effects, such as quantum superposition and coherence, will very rapidly dissipate (decohere), resulting in the suppression of any well-controlled quantum dynamics.”

In the paper

“Schrödinger was impressed by the extraordinary high fidelity of genetic inheritance, which had been shown to be associated with mutation rates of less than 10–8 per gene per generation. He claimed that high fidelity of heredity could not be accounted for by the classical laws, because genes were too small.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“He clarifies his position by arguing that, at the molecular level, life differs from inanimate matter in that it can be influenced on the macroscale by single events at the quantum level,”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [29] Haldane J. 1934. Quantum mechanics as a basis for philosophy. Philos. Sci. 1, 78–98. ( 10.1086/286307) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“He argued that genetic information had to be encoded at the molecular level as ‘an unusually large molecule which has to be a masterpiece of highly differentiated order, safeguarded by the conjuring rod of quantum theory’ [19, p. 68].”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“Using target theory, he estimated the size of a gene as no bigger than a cube of sides 300 Å containing a maximum of about 1 million atoms, so the level of noise in heredity if based on the order from disorder principle should be about one in 1000, or 0.1%—clearly much higher than the observed mutation rates.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“The organicists sought a middle ground. They accepted that there was something mysterious about life but claimed that the mystery could in principle be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry—it is just that these had to be new laws, as yet undiscovered.”

In the paper

“Jordan incorporated the organicism approach into his thinking by claiming that life's missing laws were the rules of chance and probability (the indeterminism) of the quantum world that were somehow scaled up inside living organisms. He called this his ‘amplifier theory’”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [25] Jordan P. 1932. Die Quantenmechanik und die Grundprobleme der Biologie und Psychologie. Naturwissenschaften 20, 815–821. ( 10.1007/BF01494844) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“He settled in Ireland, where in 1944 he published a book whose title posed the question ‘What is life?’ [19], to which we now turn.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“Yet Jordan correctly pointed out that inanimate objects were governed by the average random motion of millions of particles, such that the motion of a single molecule has no influence whatsoever on the whole object.”

In the paper

“However, after Germany's defeat, Jordan's highly politicized ideas became anathema. The other matchmakers of the proposed marriage between biology and fundamental physics were scattered to the four winds in the aftermath of the Second World War; and physics, shaken to its core by the atomic bomb, turned its attention to more traditional problems.”

In the paper

“By the closing years of the 1930s, a number of highly influential scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were examining the implications of the ‘new physics’ for biology, driven by a growing mechanistic picture of biology at the smallest scales, but under the umbrella of organicism.”

In the paper

“Jordan's insistence that living organisms have a unique ability to amplify the quantum into the macroscopic world does have a lot of resonance with modern views of quantum biology.”

In the paper

“Jordan was genuinely sympathetic to fascism and Nazi ideology.”

In the paper

“Schrödinger is essentially claiming that living systems somehow circumvent decoherence, an idea that resonates with modern work on the role that environmental noise may play in maintaining coherence in living cells.”

In the paper

“Nevertheless, it is being increasingly recognized that, just as Jordan and Schrödinger argued, living systems may after all depend on the dynamics of small numbers of molecules that are extremely well localized (extending across just a few nanometres—the scale of biomolecules such as proteins) and can take place over very short time scales (often of the order of picoseconds).”

• Also stated in: § 5. Current thinking · hedged

  “This relative isolation in space, complexity and time could allow non-trivial, purely quantum mechanical processes to play an important role in living systems before decoherence induced by the surrounding environment can wash them away.”

In the paper

“Jordan similarly argued that the few molecules that control the dynamics of living cells within the ‘Steuerungszentrum’ have a dictatorial influence, such that quantum-level events that govern their motion, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, are amplified to influence the entire organism.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [25] Jordan P. 1932. Die Quantenmechanik und die Grundprobleme der Biologie und Psychologie. Naturwissenschaften 20, 815–821. ( 10.1007/BF01494844) [DOI] [Google Scholar] source

In the paper

“he claimed that genetic information must be encoded by a ‘more complicated organic molecule in which every atom, and every group of atoms, plays an individual role, not entirely equivalent to that of many others (as is the case in a periodic structure). We might quite properly call that an aperiodic crystal or solid … ’ [19, pp. 60–61].”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites [19] Schrödinger E. 1944. What is life? London, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]

In the paper

“This insight, as we will see, is usually credited to Erwin Schrödinger, who later claimed that life was different from inorganic chemistry because of its dependence on the dynamics of a small number of molecules.”

In the paper

“When Watson and Crick published their structure of DNA they speculated that mutations could be caused by tautomerization of DNA bases from their common imino forms to the rare enol forms, which could produce incorrect base pairs during DNA replication.”

In the paper

“The debate has now shifted from the question of whether quantum coherence and tunnelling are involved to the role that they play.”

In the paper

“It is likely that, in that time, life has learned to manipulate quantum systems to its advantage in ways that we do not yet fully understand.”

In the paper

“Other areas of quantum biology, such as olfaction, magnetoreception or mutation, remain more speculative, at least partly because the experimental systems are not as tractable to precise physical measurement.”

In the paper

“Phenomena such as quantum tunnelling and quantum coherence are now widely accepted as being involved in vitally important processes for all living cells, such as energy transfer and enzyme action.”