How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions

I'd like to introduce you
to an emerging area of science.

One that is still speculative,
but hugely exciting.

It's certainly one that's
growing very rapidly.

Quantum biology asks
a very simple question.

Does quantum mechanics, that weird
and wonderful, and powerful theory

of the subatomic world
of atoms and molecules

that underpins so much of modern
physics and chemistry, also play

a role inside the living cell?

In other words, are there processes,
mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms

that can only be explained with a helping
hand from quantum mechanics.

Now, quantum biology isn't new.
It's been around since the early 1930s.

But its only in the last decade or so,
that careful experiments

in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy
that have shown clear, firm evidence

that there are certain specific mechanisms
that require quantum mechanics

to explain them.

Quantum biology brings together
quantum physicists, biochemists,

molecular biologists.

It's a very interdisciplinary field.

I come from quantum physics.
So, I'm a nuclear physicist.

I've spent more than three decades trying
to get my head around quantum mechanics.

One of the founders of quantum
mechanics, Neil Bohr said,

If you're not astonished by it,
then you haven't understood it.

So, I sort of feel happy that I'm still
astonished by it and that's a good thing.

But it means I study the very smallest
structures in the universe.

The building blocks of reality.

If we think about the scale of size,
start with something, an everyday object

like the tennis ball, and just go down
orders of magnitude and size.

From the eye of a needle, down to a cell,
down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme.

You eventually reach the nano world.

Now, nanotechnology may
be a term you've heard of.

A nanometer is
a billionth of a meter.

My area is the atomic nucleus,
which is the tiny dot inside an atom.

It's even smaller in scale.

This is the domain of quantum mechanics,
and physicists and chemists have had

a long time to get used to it.

Biologists on the other hand
have got off lightly, in my view.

They are very happy with their
balls-and-sticks models of molecules.

(Laughter)

The balls are the atoms, the sticks
are the bonds between the atoms

and when they can't build them
physically in the lab,

nowadays they have very powerful
computers that will simulate a huge model.

This is a protein made up
of 100,000 atoms.

It doesn't really require much in the way
of quantum mechanics to explain it.

Quantum mechanics was
developed in the 1920s.

It is a set of beautiful and powerful
mathematical rules and ideas

that explain the world
of the very small.

And it's a world that very different
from our everyday world

made up of trillions of atoms.

It's a world built on probability
and chance.

It's a fuzzy world.

It's a world of phantoms, where particles
can also behave like spread out waves.

If we imagine quantum mechanics
or quantum physics, then as

the fundamental
foundation of reality itself.

That's not really surprising
that we say quantum physics

underpins organic chemistry.

After all, it gives us the rules
that tells us the rules that tell us

how the atoms fit together
to make organic molecules.

Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity
gives us molecular biology,

which of course leads
to life itself.

So, in a way, it's sort
of not surprising.

It's almost trivial.

Say, well of course life ultimately
must depend of quantum mechanics

-- so does everything else.

So does all inanimate matter,
made up of trillions of atoms.

Ultimately, there's a quantum level
that we know where we have to delve

into this weridness.

But in everyday life,
we can forget about it.

Because once you put together trillions
of atoms, that quantum weirdness

just dissolves away.

Quantum biology isn't about this.
Quantum biology isn't this obvious.

Of course quantum mechanics underpins
life at some molecular level.

Quantum biology is about looking
for the non-trivial, the counterintuitive

ideas in quantum mechanics and to see
if they do indeed play an important role

in describing the processes of life.

Here is my perfect example
of the counterintuitiveness

of the quantum world.

This is the quantum skiier.

He seems to be intact, he seems
to be perfectly healthy.

And yet, he seems to have gone around
both sides of that tree at the same time.

Well, if you saw some tracks like that
you'd guess some sort of stunt of course.

But in the quantum world,
this happens all the time.

Particles ca multitask, they can be
in two places at once.

They can do more than
one thing at the same time.

Particles can behave
like spread out waves.

It's almost like magic.

Physicists and chemists have had
nearly a century of trying

to get used to this weirdness.

I don't blame the biologists for not
having or wanting to learn

quantum mechanics.

You see, this weirdness is very delicate
and we physicists work very hard

to maintain it on our labs.

We sort of cool our system down
to near absolute zero,

We carry out our experiments
in vacuums, we try and isolate it

from any external disturbance.

That's very different from the warm,
messy, noisy environment of a living cell.