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How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions

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    I'd like to introduce you
    to an emerging area of science.
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    One that is still speculative,
    but hugely exciting.
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    It's certainly one that's
    growing very rapidly.
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    Quantum biology asks
    a very simple question.
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    Does quantum mechanics, that weird
    and wonderful, and powerful theory
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    of the subatomic world
    of atoms and molecules
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    that underpins so much of modern
    physics and chemistry, also play
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    a role inside the living cell?
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    In other words, are there processes,
    mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms
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    that can only be explained with a helping
    hand from quantum mechanics.
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    Now, quantum biology isn't new.
    It's been around since the early 1930s.
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    But its only in the last decade or so,
    that careful experiments
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    in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy
    that have shown clear, firm evidence
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    that there are certain specific mechanisms
    that require quantum mechanics
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    to explain them.
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    Quantum biology brings together
    quantum physicists, biochemists,
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    molecular biologists.
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    It's a very interdisciplinary field.
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    I come from quantum physics.
    So, I'm a nuclear physicist.
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    I've spent more than three decades trying
    to get my head around quantum mechanics.
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    One of the founders of quantum
    mechanics, Neil Bohr said,
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    If you're not astonished by it,
    then you haven't understood it.
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    So, I sort of feel happy that I'm still
    astonished by it and that's a good thing.
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    But it means I study the very smallest
    structures in the universe.
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    The building blocks of reality.
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    If we think about the scale of size,
    start with something, an everyday object
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    like the tennis ball, and just go down
    orders of magnitude and size.
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    From the eye of a needle, down to a cell,
    down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme.
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    You eventually reach the nano world.
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    Now, nanotechnology may
    be a term you've heard of.
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    A nanometer is
    a billionth of a meter.
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    My area is the atomic nucleus,
    which is the tiny dot inside an atom.
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    It's even smaller in scale.
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    This is the domain of quantum mechanics,
    and physicists and chemists have had
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    a long time to get used to it.
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    Biologists on the other hand
    have got off lightly, in my view.
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    They are very happy with their
    balls-and-sticks models of molecules.
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    (Laughter)
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    The balls are the atoms, the sticks
    are the bonds between the atoms
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    and when they can't build them
    physically in the lab,
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    nowadays they have very powerful
    computers that will simulate a huge model.
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    This is a protein made up
    of 100,000 atoms.
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    It doesn't really require much in the way
    of quantum mechanics to explain it.
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    Quantum mechanics was
    developed in the 1920s.
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    It is a set of beautiful and powerful
    mathematical rules and ideas
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    that explain the world
    of the very small.
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    And it's a world that very different
    from our everyday world
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    made up of trillions of atoms.
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    It's a world built on probability
    and chance.
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    It's a fuzzy world.
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    It's a world of phantoms, where particles
    can also behave like spread out waves.
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    If we imagine quantum mechanics
    or quantum physics, then as
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    the fundamental
    foundation of reality itself.
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    That's not really surprising
    that we say quantum physics
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    underpins organic chemistry.
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    After all, it gives us the rules
    that tells us the rules that tell us
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    how the atoms fit together
    to make organic molecules.
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    Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity
    gives us molecular biology,
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    which of course leads
    to life itself.
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    So, in a way, it's sort
    of not surprising.
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    It's almost trivial.
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    Say, well of course life ultimately
    must depend of quantum mechanics
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    -- so does everything else.
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    So does all inanimate matter,
    made up of trillions of atoms.
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    Ultimately, there's a quantum level
    that we know where we have to delve
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    into this weridness.
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    But in everyday life,
    we can forget about it.
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    Because once you put together trillions
    of atoms, that quantum weirdness
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    just dissolves away.
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    Quantum biology isn't about this.
    Quantum biology isn't this obvious.
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    Of course quantum mechanics underpins
    life at some molecular level.
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    Quantum biology is about looking
    for the non-trivial, the counterintuitive
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    ideas in quantum mechanics and to see
    if they do indeed play an important role
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    in describing the processes of life.
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    Here is my perfect example
    of the counterintuitiveness
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    of the quantum world.
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    This is the quantum skiier.
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    He seems to be intact, he seems
    to be perfectly healthy.
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    And yet, he seems to have gone around
    both sides of that tree at the same time.
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    Well, if you saw some tracks like that
    you'd guess some sort of stunts of course.
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    But in the quantum world,
    this happens all the time.
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    Particles can multitask, they can be
    in two places at once.
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    They can do more than
    one thing at the same time.
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    Particles can behave
    like spread out waves.
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    It's almost like magic.
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    Physicists and chemists have had
    nearly a century of trying
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    to get used to this weirdness.
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    I don't blame the biologists for not
    having or wanting to learn
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    quantum mechanics.
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    You see, this weirdness is very delicate
    and we physicists work very hard
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    to maintain it on our labs.
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    We sort of cool our system down
    to near absolute zero,
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    We carry out our experiments
    in vacuums, we try and isolate it
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    from any external disturbance.
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    That's very different from the warm,
    messy, noisy environment of a living cell.
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    Biology itself, if you think of molecular
    biology, seems to have done very well
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    in describing all the processes of life,
    in terms of chemistry.
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    Chemical reactions!
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    And these are reductionist, deterministic
    chemical reactions showing that
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    essentially life, is made of the same
    stuff as everything else,
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    and if we can forget about quantum
    mechanics in the macro world,
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    then we should be able to forget
    about it in biology, as well.
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    Well, one man begged
    to differ with this idea.
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    Erwin Schrödinger, he of Schrödinger's Cat
    fame, an Austrian physicist.
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    He was one of the founders
    of quantum mechanics in the 1920s.
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    In 1944, he wrote a book
    called "What is Life?"
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    It was tremendously influential.
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    It influenced Francis Crick
    and James Watson,
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    the discoverer's of the double helix
    structure of DNA.
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    To paraphrase a description in the book,
    he says, at the molecular level,
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    living organism have a certain order,
    a structure to them that's very
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    different from the random thermodynamic
    jostling of atoms and molecules
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    in inanimate matter
    of the same complexity.
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    In fact, living matter seems to behave
    in its order, in its structure
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    just like inanimate matter cooled
    down to near absolute zero,
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    where quantum effects
    play a very important role.
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    There's something special about
    the structure, the order
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    inside of living cell.
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    So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe
    quantum mechanics plays a role in life.
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    It's a very speculative, sort of
    far-reaching idea and it didn't
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    really go very far.
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    But, as I mentioned at the start,
    in the last 10 years
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    there have been experiment emerging,
    showing where some of these certain
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    phenomena in biology, do seem
    to require quantum mechanics.
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    Now, I want to share with you
    just a few of the exciting ones.
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    This is one of the best known
    phenomena in the quantum world.
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    Quantum tunneling.
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    The box on the left, shows the wavelike
    spread out distribution of quantum entity.
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    A particle, like an electron.
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    Which is not a little ball
    bouncing off a wall.
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    It's a wave that has a certain probability
    of being able to permeate through
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    a solid wall, like a phantom
    leaping through to the other side.
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    You can see a faint smudge of light
    in the right hand box.
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    Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle
    can hit an impenetrable barrier and yet,
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    somehow, as if by magic, disappear from
    one side and reappear on the other.
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    The nicest way of explaining it,
    is if you want to throw a ball
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    over a wall, you have to give it enough
    energy to get over the top of the wall.
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    In the quantum world, you don't have
    to throw it over the wall.
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    You can throw it at the wall and three's
    a certain non-zero probability that it'll
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    disappear on one side,
    and reappear on the other.
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    This isn't speculation,
    by the way, we're happy
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    -- i'm sorry, happy is not the right word.
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    (Laughter)
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    We are familiar with this.
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    (Laughter)
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    Quantum tunneling takes place
    all the time, in fact
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    it's the reason our sun shines.
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    The particles fuse together and the sun
    is turning hydrogen into helium
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    through quantum tunneling.
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    Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered
    that quantum tunneling also takes place
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    inside living cells.
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    Enzymes, those workhorses of life,
    the catalysts of chemical reaction.
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    Enzymes are biomolecules that speed
    up chemical reactions in living cells.
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    By many, many orders of magnitude.
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    And it's always been a mystery
    how they do this.
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    Well, it was discovered that one
    of the tricks that enzymes have evolved
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    to make use of, is by transferring
    subatomic particles, like electrons
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    and indeed protons, from one part
    of a molecule to another via
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    quantum tunneling.
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    It's efficient, it's fast,
    it can disappear
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    -- a proton can disappear from one place
    and a reappear on the other.
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    Enzymes help this take place.
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    This is research that's been carried out
    back in the 80s, particularly by a group
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    Berkeley, Judith Klinman.
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    Other groups in the UK have now also
    confirmed that enzymes really do this.
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    Research carried out by my group
    -- so I mentioned I'm a nuclear physicist,
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    but I realize I've got these tools
    of using quantum mechanics
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    in atomic nuclei and so can apply those
    tools in other areas, as well.
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    One question we asked was, whether
    quantum tunneling plays a role
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    in mutations in DNA.
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    Again, this is not a new idea.
    It goes all the way back to the early 60s.
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    The two strands of DNA, the double helix
    structure are held together by rungs,
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    it's like a twisted ladder.
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    And those rungs of the ladder
    are hydrogen bonds.
Title:
How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions
Speaker:
Jim Al-Khalili
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
16:09

English subtitles

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