Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

by Jim Al-Khalili

Mysteries, however small, are fascinating because there’s always the possibility that their solution may lead to a fundamental shift in our understanding of the world. Copernicus’s ponderings in the sixteenth century on a relatively minor problem concerning the geometry of the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system, for instance, led him to shift the centre of gravity of the entire universe away from humankind.

Almost everyone will have heard of ‘quantum mechanics’, and the idea that this is a baffling and difficult area of science understood only by a tiny, very smart minority of humans is very much part of popular culture. Yet the truth is that quantum mechanics has been part of all our lives since the early twentieth century.

it has been estimated that over one-third of the gross domestic product of the developed world depends on applications that would simply not exist without our understanding

Biomolecules such as DNA or enzymes are made of fundamental particles like protons and electrons whose interactions are governed by quantum mechanics. But then, so is the structure of the book you are reading or the chair you are sitting on. The way you walk or talk or eat or sleep or even think must ultimately depend on quantum mechanical forces governing electrons, protons and other particles,

There is, however, a place in our solar system where the basic ingredients that make up rocks and stones have been brought together in such a variety of form, function and chemistry that just one gram of the resulting material exceeds in diversity all the matter found elsewhere in the known universe. This place is, of course, that pale blue dot photographed by Voyager 1, the planet we call the earth. Most remarkably, those diverse raw materials that make our planet’s surface so unique have come together to create life.

Gaze up at the night sky and photons of light enter your eyes to be transmuted by retinal tissue into tiny electric currents that travel along your optic nerves to reach the nervous tissue of your brain. There they generate a flickering pattern of nerve firing that you experience as the twinkling star in the sky above you.

each tiny movement of your body, as you watch the stars, listen to the wind and sniff the air, is generated by the coordinated action of hundreds of muscles.

The computation skill of the grey fleshy material locked within our bony skulls exceeds that of every computer on the planet and has created the Pyramids, the General Theory of Relativity, Swan Lake, the Rig Veda, Hamlet, Ming pottery and Donald Duck. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, the human brain possesses the capacity to know that it exists.

question in science, one that is central to this book, is how the inert atoms and molecules found in rocks are transformed every day into running, jumping, flying, navigating, swimming, growing, loving, hating, lusting, fearing, thinking, laughing, crying, living stuff. Familiarity renders this extraordinary transformation unremarkable, but it is worth remembering that even in this age of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, nothing living has ever been made by humans entirely from non-living materials.

our technology has so far failed to manage a transformation that is effortlessly executed by even the simplest microbe on our planet suggests that our knowledge of what it takes to make life is incomplete.

The central puzzle of life is this: why does matter behave so differently when it makes up a living creature compared to when it is a rock?

the singular object that is the balloon strictly obeys the gas law because the orderly motion of its single continuous elastic surface arises from the disorderly motions of very large numbers of particles, generating, as Schrödinger put it, order from disorder.

all the laws of classical physics and chemistry – including the laws governing the dynamics of fluids or chemical reactions – are based on this ‘averaging of large numbers’ or ‘order from disorder’ principle.