1 00:00:01,113 --> 00:00:05,742 I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science. 2 00:00:05,742 --> 00:00:09,843 One that is still speculative, but hugely exciting. 3 00:00:09,843 --> 00:00:12,338 It's certainly one that's growing very rapidly. 4 00:00:13,322 --> 00:00:17,188 Quantum biology asks a very simple question. 5 00:00:17,703 --> 00:00:22,153 Does quantum mechanics, that weird and wonderful, and powerful theory 6 00:00:22,153 --> 00:00:24,932 of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules 7 00:00:24,932 --> 00:00:29,523 that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry, also play 8 00:00:29,523 --> 00:00:31,805 a role inside the living cell? 9 00:00:31,945 --> 00:00:37,825 In other words, are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms 10 00:00:38,165 --> 00:00:43,130 that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics? 11 00:00:43,546 --> 00:00:47,584 Now, quantum biology isn't new. It's been around since the early 1930s. 12 00:00:48,068 --> 00:00:51,743 But its only in the last decade or so, that careful experiments 13 00:00:51,743 --> 00:00:58,687 in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy that have shown very clear, firm evidence 14 00:00:58,855 --> 00:01:03,567 that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics 15 00:01:03,567 --> 00:01:04,512 to explain them. 16 00:01:05,824 --> 00:01:09,179 Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists, 17 00:01:09,179 --> 00:01:10,270 molecular biologists. 18 00:01:10,270 --> 00:01:12,553 It's a very interdisciplinary field. 19 00:01:12,872 --> 00:01:16,726 I come from quantum physics. So, I'm a nuclear physicist. 20 00:01:16,726 --> 00:01:21,392 I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics. 21 00:01:21,901 --> 00:01:24,626 One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Neil Bohr said, 22 00:01:24,626 --> 00:01:27,754 If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it. 23 00:01:28,310 --> 00:01:32,282 So, I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it and that's a good thing. 24 00:01:32,753 --> 00:01:39,782 But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe. 25 00:01:39,782 --> 00:01:41,881 The building blocks of reality. 26 00:01:41,881 --> 00:01:46,980 If we think about the scale of size, start with something, an everyday object 27 00:01:46,980 --> 00:01:50,996 like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude and size. 28 00:01:51,112 --> 00:01:56,313 From the eye of a needle, down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme. 29 00:01:56,313 --> 00:01:57,985 You eventually reach the nano world. 30 00:01:57,985 --> 00:02:00,423 Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of. 31 00:02:00,841 --> 00:02:03,952 A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. 32 00:02:04,692 --> 00:02:08,974 My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom. 33 00:02:08,974 --> 00:02:10,911 It's even smaller in scale. 34 00:02:10,911 --> 00:02:14,981 This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had 35 00:02:14,981 --> 00:02:16,654 a long time to get used to it. 36 00:02:17,049 --> 00:02:22,149 Biologists on the other hand have got off lightly, in my view. 37 00:02:22,184 --> 00:02:26,501 They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules. 38 00:02:26,618 --> 00:02:27,635 (Laughter) 39 00:02:27,635 --> 00:02:30,663 The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms 40 00:02:30,663 --> 00:02:32,434 and when they can't build them physically in the lab, 41 00:02:32,434 --> 00:02:37,654 nowadays they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge model. 42 00:02:38,071 --> 00:02:41,090 This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms. 43 00:02:42,064 --> 00:02:46,268 It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it. 44 00:02:47,659 --> 00:02:51,072 Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. 45 00:02:51,133 --> 00:02:57,274 It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas 46 00:02:57,669 --> 00:03:00,501 that explain the world of the very small. 47 00:03:00,501 --> 00:03:03,705 And it's a world that very different from our everyday world 48 00:03:03,705 --> 00:03:05,222 made up of trillions of atoms. 49 00:03:05,339 --> 00:03:09,017 It's a world built on probability and chance. 50 00:03:09,818 --> 00:03:11,341 It's a fuzzy world. 51 00:03:11,341 --> 00:03:16,222 It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread out waves. 52 00:03:18,157 --> 00:03:21,383 If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then as 53 00:03:21,383 --> 00:03:26,034 the fundamental foundation of reality itself. 54 00:03:26,423 --> 00:03:29,095 That's not surprising that we say quantum physics 55 00:03:29,095 --> 00:03:30,570 underpins organic chemistry. 56 00:03:30,570 --> 00:03:32,787 After all, it gives us the rules that tells us 57 00:03:32,787 --> 00:03:34,982 how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules. 58 00:03:35,142 --> 00:03:40,083 Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity gives us molecular biology, 59 00:03:40,083 --> 00:03:41,927 which of course leads to life itself. 60 00:03:42,215 --> 00:03:44,271 So, in a way, it's sort of not surprising. 61 00:03:44,271 --> 00:03:45,662 It's almost trivial. 62 00:03:45,833 --> 00:03:49,633 Say, well of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics. 63 00:03:50,275 --> 00:03:52,668 But, so does everything else. 64 00:03:52,668 --> 00:03:56,367 So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms. 65 00:03:56,437 --> 00:04:02,276 Ultimately, there's a quantum level that we know where we have to delve 66 00:04:02,276 --> 00:04:03,610 into this weridness. 67 00:04:03,610 --> 00:04:06,026 But in everyday life, we can forget about it. 68 00:04:06,462 --> 00:04:10,832 Because once you put together trillions of atoms, that quantum weirdness 69 00:04:10,832 --> 00:04:12,388 just dissolves away. 70 00:04:15,436 --> 00:04:20,490 Quantum biology isn't about this. Quantum biology isn't this obvious. 71 00:04:20,676 --> 00:04:24,925 Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. 72 00:04:25,203 --> 00:04:33,169 Quantum biology is about looking for the non-trivial, the counterintuitive 73 00:04:33,169 --> 00:04:38,974 ideas in quantum mechanics and to see if they do indeed play an important role 74 00:04:38,974 --> 00:04:41,273 in describing the processes of life. 75 00:04:42,600 --> 00:04:47,310 Here is my perfect example of the counterintuitiveness 76 00:04:47,755 --> 00:04:49,459 of the quantum world. 77 00:04:49,459 --> 00:04:50,760 This is the quantum skiier. 78 00:04:50,760 --> 00:04:53,378 He seems to be intact, he seems to be perfectly healthy. 79 00:04:53,378 --> 00:04:57,103 And yet, he seems to have gone around both sides of that tree at the same time. 80 00:04:57,307 --> 00:05:01,145 Well, if you saw some tracks like that you'd guess some sort of stunts of course. 81 00:05:01,383 --> 00:05:03,844 But in the quantum world, this happens all the time. 82 00:05:05,074 --> 00:05:08,023 Particles can multitask, they can be in two places at once. 83 00:05:08,023 --> 00:05:10,392 They can do more than one thing at the same time. 84 00:05:10,392 --> 00:05:12,969 Particles can behave like spread out waves. 85 00:05:13,453 --> 00:05:14,897 It's almost like magic. 86 00:05:15,538 --> 00:05:19,053 Physicists and chemists have had nearly a century of trying 87 00:05:19,215 --> 00:05:20,957 to get used to this weirdness. 88 00:05:21,722 --> 00:05:24,416 I don't blame the biologists for not having or wanting to learn 89 00:05:24,416 --> 00:05:25,298 quantum mechanics. 90 00:05:25,358 --> 00:05:31,220 You see, this weirdness is very delicate and we physicists work very hard 91 00:05:31,220 --> 00:05:33,517 to maintain it on our labs. 92 00:05:33,564 --> 00:05:37,837 We sort of cool our system down to near absolute zero, 93 00:05:37,837 --> 00:05:41,158 We carry out our experiments in vacuums, we try and isolate it 94 00:05:41,158 --> 00:05:42,898 from any external disturbance. 95 00:05:43,944 --> 00:05:48,680 That's very different from the warm, messy, noisy environment of a living cell. 96 00:05:50,074 --> 00:05:54,624 Biology itself, if you think of molecular biology, seems to have done very well 97 00:05:54,624 --> 00:05:57,665 in describing all the processes of life, in terms of chemistry. 98 00:05:57,689 --> 00:05:58,920 Chemical reactions! 99 00:05:59,105 --> 00:06:04,307 And these are reductionist, deterministic chemical reactions showing that 100 00:06:04,307 --> 00:06:08,556 essentially life, is made of the same stuff as everything else, 101 00:06:08,597 --> 00:06:11,690 and if we can forget about quantum mechanics in the macro world, 102 00:06:11,969 --> 00:06:15,104 then we should be able to forget about it in biology, as well. 103 00:06:15,722 --> 00:06:19,282 Well, one man begged to differ with this idea. 104 00:06:20,062 --> 00:06:24,624 Erwin Schrödinger, he of Schrödinger's Cat fame, an Austrian physicist. 105 00:06:24,686 --> 00:06:28,144 He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. 106 00:06:28,462 --> 00:06:31,590 In 1944, he wrote a book called "What is Life?" 107 00:06:31,906 --> 00:06:33,681 It was tremendously influential. 108 00:06:33,681 --> 00:06:35,895 It influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, 109 00:06:35,908 --> 00:06:38,487 the discoverer's of the double helix structure of DNA. 110 00:06:39,415 --> 00:06:44,964 To paraphrase a description in the book, he says, at the molecular level, 111 00:06:44,964 --> 00:06:51,767 living organism have a certain order, a structure to them that's very 112 00:06:51,767 --> 00:06:56,780 different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules 113 00:06:56,780 --> 00:07:01,094 in inanimate matter of the same complexity. 114 00:07:01,504 --> 00:07:06,604 In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order, in its structure 115 00:07:06,604 --> 00:07:10,644 just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, 116 00:07:10,644 --> 00:07:13,433 where quantum effects play a very important role. 117 00:07:14,418 --> 00:07:17,564 There's something special about the structure, the order 118 00:07:18,464 --> 00:07:20,048 inside a living cell. 119 00:07:20,048 --> 00:07:25,341 So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life. 120 00:07:25,899 --> 00:07:30,095 It's a very speculative, sort of far-reaching idea and it didn't 121 00:07:30,095 --> 00:07:32,610 really go very far. 122 00:07:33,397 --> 00:07:35,934 But, as I mentioned at the start, in the last 10 years 123 00:07:35,934 --> 00:07:40,833 there have been experiment emerging, showing where some of these certain 124 00:07:40,833 --> 00:07:43,681 phenomena in biology, do seem to require quantum mechanics. 125 00:07:43,681 --> 00:07:46,890 I want to share with you just a few of the exciting ones. 126 00:07:48,215 --> 00:07:52,276 This is one of the best known phenomena in the quantum world. 127 00:07:52,276 --> 00:07:53,646 Quantum tunneling. 128 00:07:53,941 --> 00:07:59,334 The box on the left, shows the wavelike spread out distribution of quantum entity. 129 00:07:59,340 --> 00:08:00,844 A particle, like an electron. 130 00:08:01,046 --> 00:08:03,970 Which is not a little ball bouncing off a wall. 131 00:08:04,530 --> 00:08:09,610 It's a wave that has a certain probability of being able to permeate through 132 00:08:09,610 --> 00:08:12,787 a solid wall, like a phantom leaping through to the other side. 133 00:08:12,787 --> 00:08:16,742 You can see a faint smudge of light in the right hand box. 134 00:08:17,502 --> 00:08:22,838 Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle can hit an impenetrable barrier and yet, 135 00:08:22,874 --> 00:08:27,100 somehow, as if by magic, disappear from one side and reappear on the other. 136 00:08:27,425 --> 00:08:31,976 The nicest way of explaining it, is if you want to throw a ball 137 00:08:31,976 --> 00:08:35,786 over a wall, you have to give it enough energy to get over the top of the wall. 138 00:08:35,808 --> 00:08:38,874 In the quantum world, you don't have to throw it over the wall. 139 00:08:38,874 --> 00:08:42,735 You can throw it at the wall and three's a certain non-zero probability that it'll 140 00:08:42,735 --> 00:08:45,187 disappear on your side, and reappear on the other. 141 00:08:45,194 --> 00:08:49,023 This isn't speculation, by the way, we're happy 142 00:08:49,023 --> 00:08:51,050 -- I'm sorry, happy is not the right word. 143 00:08:51,410 --> 00:08:52,540 (Laughter) 144 00:08:52,681 --> 00:08:54,502 We are familiar with this. 145 00:08:54,688 --> 00:08:55,617 (Laughter) 146 00:08:56,725 --> 00:09:00,763 Quantum tunneling takes place all the time, in fact 147 00:09:00,763 --> 00:09:03,093 it's the reason our sun shines. 148 00:09:03,093 --> 00:09:06,394 The particles fuse together in the sun is turning hydrogen into helium 149 00:09:06,394 --> 00:09:08,019 through quantum tunneling. 150 00:09:09,554 --> 00:09:14,708 Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place 151 00:09:14,708 --> 00:09:16,468 inside living cells. 152 00:09:16,596 --> 00:09:22,713 Enzymes, those workhorses of life, the catalysts of chemical reaction. 153 00:09:22,806 --> 00:09:26,828 Enzymes are biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells. 154 00:09:26,828 --> 00:09:28,673 By many, many orders of magnitude. 155 00:09:28,673 --> 00:09:31,281 And it's always been a mystery how they do this. 156 00:09:31,688 --> 00:09:36,246 Well, it was discovered that one of the tricks that enzymes have evolved 157 00:09:36,246 --> 00:09:41,850 to make use of, is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons 158 00:09:41,850 --> 00:09:46,614 and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via 159 00:09:46,614 --> 00:09:48,347 quantum tunneling. 160 00:09:48,449 --> 00:09:50,792 It's efficient, it's fast, it can disappear 161 00:09:50,792 --> 00:09:54,054 -- a proton can disappear from one place and a reappear on the other. 162 00:09:54,054 --> 00:09:56,221 Enzymes help this take place. 163 00:09:56,602 --> 00:10:01,257 This is research that's been carried out back in the 80s, particularly by a group 164 00:10:01,257 --> 00:10:03,533 in Berkeley, Judith Klinman. 165 00:10:03,533 --> 00:10:07,129 Other groups in the UK have now also confirmed that enzymes really do this. 166 00:10:09,286 --> 00:10:14,130 Research carried out by my group -- so I mentioned I'm a nuclear physicist, 167 00:10:14,130 --> 00:10:17,158 but I've realize I've got these tools of using quantum mechanics 168 00:10:17,158 --> 00:10:22,243 in atomic nuclei and so can apply those tools in other areas, as well. 169 00:10:23,566 --> 00:10:27,885 One question we asked was, whether quantum tunneling plays a role 170 00:10:27,885 --> 00:10:29,626 in mutations in DNA. 171 00:10:29,720 --> 00:10:33,170 Again, this is not a new idea. It goes all the way back to the early 60s. 172 00:10:33,527 --> 00:10:37,962 The two strands of DNA, the double helix structure are held together by rungs, 173 00:10:37,962 --> 00:10:39,401 it's like a twisted ladder. 174 00:10:39,602 --> 00:10:42,970 And those rungs of the ladder are hydrogen bonds. 175 00:10:42,970 --> 00:10:46,460 Protons that act as the glue between the two strands. 176 00:10:46,704 --> 00:10:51,453 So, if you zoom in, what they're doing is holding these large molecules, 177 00:10:51,685 --> 00:10:53,333 nucleotides, together. 178 00:10:54,378 --> 00:10:55,304 Zoom in a bit more. 179 00:10:55,304 --> 00:10:57,514 So, this a computer simulation. 180 00:10:58,115 --> 00:11:02,690 The two white balls in the middle are protons and you can see that 181 00:11:02,690 --> 00:11:03,968 it's a double hydrogen bond. 182 00:11:04,176 --> 00:11:08,003 One prefers to sit one side, the other on the other side of the stands. 183 00:11:08,003 --> 00:11:11,719 The two strands of the vertical lines going down, which you can't see. 184 00:11:12,652 --> 00:11:15,646 It can happen that these two protons can hop over. 185 00:11:15,775 --> 00:11:19,327 Watch the two white balls. They can jump over to the other side. 186 00:11:20,336 --> 00:11:25,909 If the two strands then separate, leading to the process of replication, 187 00:11:25,909 --> 00:11:31,069 and the two protons are in the wrong positions, this can lead to a mutation. 188 00:11:31,109 --> 00:11:32,986 This has been known for half a century. 189 00:11:32,986 --> 00:11:38,129 The question is how likely can they do that, and if they do, how do they do it? 190 00:11:38,196 --> 00:11:40,886 Do they jump across, like the ball going over the wall? 191 00:11:40,912 --> 00:11:44,414 Or can they quantum tunnel across, even if they don't have enough energy? 192 00:11:45,089 --> 00:11:49,407 Early indications suggest that quantum tunneling can play a role here. 193 00:11:49,570 --> 00:11:53,181 We still don't know yet how important it is, it's still an open question. 194 00:11:53,332 --> 00:11:57,603 It's speculative, but it's one of those questions that it is so important, 195 00:11:57,603 --> 00:12:01,224 that if quantum mechanics plays a role in mutations, surely this must 196 00:12:01,224 --> 00:12:06,078 have big implications, to understand certain types of mutations, possibly even 197 00:12:06,265 --> 00:12:09,307 those that lead to turning a cell cancerous. 198 00:12:10,515 --> 00:12:16,341 Another example of quantum mechanics in biology is quantum coherence 199 00:12:16,341 --> 00:12:19,545 in one of the most important process in biology, photosynthesis. 200 00:12:20,002 --> 00:12:25,398 Plants and bacteria taking sunlight, using that energy to create biomass. 201 00:12:26,116 --> 00:12:30,367 Quantum coherence is the idea of quantum entities multitasking. 202 00:12:30,912 --> 00:12:32,540 It's the quantum skier. 203 00:12:32,540 --> 00:12:37,053 It's an object that behaves like a wave, so that it doesn't just move 204 00:12:37,053 --> 00:12:41,767 in one direction or the other, but can follow multiple pathways at the same time. 205 00:12:42,708 --> 00:12:48,478 Some years ago, the world of science was shocked when a paper was published 206 00:12:48,722 --> 00:12:52,285 showing experimental evidence, that quantum coherence takes place 207 00:12:52,357 --> 00:12:55,536 inside bacteria, carrying out photosynthesis. 208 00:12:55,621 --> 00:12:58,996 The idea is that the photon, the particle of light, the sunlight, 209 00:12:59,031 --> 00:13:03,094 the quantum of light, captured by a chlorophyl molecule, is then delivered 210 00:13:03,094 --> 00:13:06,910 to what's called the reaction center where it can be turned into chemical energy. 211 00:13:06,910 --> 00:13:10,638 And in getting there, it doesn't just follow one root, it follows multiple 212 00:13:10,638 --> 00:13:15,576 pathways at once, to optimize the most efficient way of reaching the reaction 213 00:13:15,576 --> 00:13:18,245 center, without dissipating as waste heat. 214 00:13:19,228 --> 00:13:22,470 Quantum coherence taking place inside a living cell. 215 00:13:22,561 --> 00:13:30,111 A remarkable idea, and yet evidence is growing almost weekly with new papers 216 00:13:30,111 --> 00:13:33,267 coming out, confirming that this does indeed take place. 217 00:13:33,555 --> 00:13:38,557 My third and final example is the most beautiful, wonderful idea. 218 00:13:38,557 --> 00:13:42,665 It's also still a very speculative, but I have to share it with you. 219 00:13:42,665 --> 00:13:48,441 The European Robin migrates from Scandinavia, down to the Mediterranean 220 00:13:48,441 --> 00:13:52,934 every autumn and like a lot of other marine animals and even insects, 221 00:13:52,934 --> 00:13:57,694 they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. 222 00:13:58,948 --> 00:14:01,340 Now the Earth's magnetic field is very, very weak. 223 00:14:01,340 --> 00:14:03,885 It's 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet and yet 224 00:14:03,894 --> 00:14:09,560 it affects the chemistry, somehow, within a living organism. 225 00:14:09,933 --> 00:14:13,436 That's not in doubt, a German couple of onothologists 226 00:14:13,762 --> 00:14:18,046 Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko, in the 1970s confirmed that indeed 227 00:14:18,046 --> 00:14:21,869 the robin does find it's way by somehow sensing the Earth's magnetic field, 228 00:14:21,954 --> 00:14:25,367 to give it directional information, a built-in compass. 229 00:14:25,398 --> 00:14:27,647 The puzzle, the mystery was how does it do it? 230 00:14:28,351 --> 00:14:32,847 Well, the only theory in town, we don't know if it's the correct theory, 231 00:14:32,847 --> 00:14:36,076 but the only theory in town, is that it does it via something called 232 00:14:36,076 --> 00:14:37,929 quantum entanglement. 233 00:14:38,480 --> 00:14:42,202 Inside the robin's retina -- I kid you not. 234 00:14:42,202 --> 00:14:45,368 Inside the robin's retina, is a protein called cryptochrome, 235 00:14:45,368 --> 00:14:46,624 which is light sensitive. 236 00:14:46,624 --> 00:14:50,887 Within cryptochrome, a pair of electrons are quantum entangled. 237 00:14:50,887 --> 00:14:54,623 Now quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart and yet somehow 238 00:14:54,623 --> 00:14:56,678 remain in contact with each other. 239 00:14:56,921 --> 00:15:00,109 Even Einstein hated that idea, he called it spooky action at a distance. 240 00:15:00,479 --> 00:15:01,749 (Laughter) 241 00:15:02,429 --> 00:15:05,764 If Einstein doesn't like it, then we can all be uncomfortable with it. 242 00:15:05,764 --> 00:15:10,269 Two quantum entangled electrons within a single molecule, dance a delicate dance 243 00:15:10,269 --> 00:15:12,916 that is very sensitive to the direction the bird flies 244 00:15:12,916 --> 00:15:14,472 in the Earth's magnetic field. 245 00:15:15,043 --> 00:15:19,504 We don't know if it's the correct explanation, but wow wouldn't it be 246 00:15:19,504 --> 00:15:22,026 exciting if quantum mechanics helps birds navigate. 247 00:15:22,816 --> 00:15:29,619 Quantum biology is still in it infancy. It's still speculative. 248 00:15:29,847 --> 00:15:33,984 But I believe it's built on solid science. 249 00:15:34,040 --> 00:15:39,115 I also think that in the coming decade, or so, we're going to start to see 250 00:15:39,572 --> 00:15:45,586 that actually it pervades life, that life has evolved tricks that utilize 251 00:15:45,901 --> 00:15:47,730 the quantum world. 252 00:15:48,026 --> 00:15:49,402 Watch this space. 253 00:15:49,685 --> 00:15:50,470 Thank you. 254 00:15:50,818 --> 00:15:52,861 (Applause)