Scale Shifting: Quantum Biology, Quantum Omics, & a Quantum Biotech Future

CarmineGoose

Quantum biology is presented as a coherent scientific discipline rather than a collection of anomalies. Scale-shifting effects, rare in non-living matter but pervasive in life, naturally amplify transient quantum states into physiologically relevant signals with evolution, not engineering, having performed the work of stabilizing the outputs of these fleeting events. This essay outlines an empirical program to accelerate the field’s coalescence by leveraging conventional ‘omics’ tools and focusing on tractable microbial systems and evolutionarily ancient traits, rather than complex animal or human behaviors, with magneto-sensing offered as an illustrative case.

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RustSilverfish

You've provided an intriguing argument that bucks the trend of many submissions (at least of those I've read): rather than outlining what is quantum about quantum biology (mainly rehashing the same examples over and over again), you focused on what makes it distinctly biological. The notion of 'scale shifting' here is highly intriguing: biology is that science where a neat level decomposition, with 'higher' levels being largely screened off from below, ceases to be effective. Indeed, one could somewhat fancifully imagine using this to have another stab at the ancient demarcation problem between the sciences: in physics, with the phenomenon of universality, it is often explicitly the case that lower-level phenomena can be totally removed from consideration; chemistry then starts to buck that trend with trace levels of reactant introducing avalanche effects, and so on. For biology, in a sense it may be natural that it has to incorporate scale shifting: after all, the business of living organisms is to preserve their macrostates against the tendency of microstates to evolve into regions of the state space associated with higher entropy, so perhaps, some feedback is to be expected.

Interestingly, the business of science itself can also be thought to break through the scales in the other direction, with large-scale experiments (think the LHC) probing microscopic regimes. So perhaps biology is the way the micro-level organizes macroscopic structures to then again exert causal influence on it. (Then again, perhaps all life is is just a chemical reaction to precipitate superheavy elements...)

However, I'm somewhat less sure of your injunction to look for quantum effects first among the microscale of life. It seems to contravene the main thrust of your argument. After all, perhaps it needs a certain complexity to effect meaningful scale shifts to quantum relevant regimes (again, think about the size of the LHC's detectors). I get the pragmatic justification, but this also seems to risk a lamppost effect: looking where it's easy just because it's easy. It does not seem a given, especially in light of your own argumentation, that microscopic life has a better shot at nurturing quantum effects.

Still, I think this is one of the most original contributions to the contest I've read so far, and I hope it will do well!

ShockwaveRider

Everyone keeps trying to write power laws and scaling laws, and becoming more confused by the day. French researchers have already published the first evidence that information itself obeys quantum mechanics in the everyday world all around us, and can be up to 125% efficient. Suggesting scales and magnitudes express their own particle-wave duality, and classic logic is self-contradictory, while fuzzy logic is incredibly vague and tautological. Unless you can account for information being more efficient, your biology has no legs.

SepiaBeetle

I think this is a really interesting essay. It's one of the few where the idea actually got me thinking about its plausibility. Ultimately I think there are some pretty significant problems with the argument however. I'll try to organise my thoughts, in the hope you might have some rebuttal stored up!

Okay the single biggest problem I have is one all cascade effects. share - there's a signal-to-noise paradox here, which the essay completely glosses over. If a cell's cascade is sensitive enough to be reliably triggered by a single, specific quantum event (a spin state), it must also be sensitive to all other quantum-scale thermal fluctuations. The cell should be drowning in noise. The essay never explains how the "amplifier" distinguishes the "signal" (a spin state) from the "noise" that should, by all rights, be triggering it constantly. This incidentally is exactly the reason why Schrodinger makes the argument that life must occur on the scale of cells rather than atoms, because this kind of noise sensitivity would make structured and predictable behaviour phenomenologically impossible.

Moreover, where is your evidence for this? You give the example of a DNA mutation, but surely this is a very different kind of event from its proposed quantum trigger. A DNA mutation is a permanent, high-energy change to a stable information template. The cascade (replication) reads this new, permanent information. A radical-pair spin state is a fleeting, low-energy change in an unstable intermediate. The cascade would have to catch this signal in the femtoseconds before it decoheres. These are not comparable. The essay's "root proposal" rests on an analogy that breaks down under physical scrutiny. Moreover, there's a whiff of constructing a "Just-So" Evolutionary Story. The essay asks, "Why does life use quantum processes?" and answers "sensing". This is a plausible narrative, but it's an unfalsifiable "just-so" story. It assumes this "quantum fitness advantage" exists without proving that the (enormous) metabolic and structural costs of building and maintaining such a hyper-sensitive, noise-protected system are worth the "marginal" information gain. Finally, as you correctly pointed out, the essay has no evidence. Its best case (magnetoreception) is a contested hypothesis, not a proven fact. The entire essay is a conceptual framework for a research program that has not yet yielded a single, unambiguous result. It's 100% speculation, albeit well-structured. It also says nothing about why the proposed sensitivity need be quantum!

I'm aware this sounds incredibly negative, but I wouldn't be writing at all if I didn't find the idea animating the essay highly interesting. It's a very creative idea, and it took me a hot minute to figure out why in my gut I didn't believe it. So on that score alone I think it's one of the top two or three essays I've read. Hope to hear your response!

Michael Montague

SepiaBeetle Reproduction in living systems is more than just signal amplification... It is also inherently SELECTION. That's the answer to both of your objections: Noise, and the Just So story aspect. We only see the colonies that survive the antibiotic. We only see the tumor that has just the right adaptations to evade cell-cycle controls. We only see the mutations that survive. All those other mutations and colonies and adaptations also exist, but they die and thus are not part of the set we see after the fact as it were. We only see the signal, because the noise dies.

Living systems don't just HAPPEN to have such noise-filtering selective properties, they are evolved to create and take advantage of and structure them very precisely. As just one example look at the reverse transcriptase of the HIV virus (it's geneome replication enzyme). Like all DNA polymerases, and indeed like all information processing systems of any kind, HIV's reverse transcriptase has a greater than zero error rate. That is to say, as it copies it's genome it makes mistakes... introduces mutations into the copy. As it happens, the HIV reverse transcriptase has a very low fidelity... it introduces WAY more mutations than similar enzymes, which means we know how to 'fix' it. But, if we do, if, if we create a variant HIV with a modified reverse transcriptase that has a fidelity 10x higher and infect animals with it, the animals quickly clear the infection. (These experiments have actually been performed). For the virus, higher genome copying fidelity leads to a LOWER long-term evolutionary fitness. Why? Because viruses have the ultimate in "Lo-K" reproduction strategy... they spawn thousands to millions of viral particles per parent infected cell. This means they can afford the immediate-term loss a huge fraction of progeny virus to mutations if it results in occasionally stumbling across a virus-variant that evades the systemic long-term threat of the host immune system. Too low a fidelity and one does not have enough viable progeny virus, too high and one does not have enough genetic diversity across the whole infection to evade immune response. HIV, and similar viruses, have a very precisely tuned error rate to ride the sweet-spot in that dynamic. Viewed from the point of view of only the lineage of the survivor virus that ultimately brings down the patient that DOES look like a just-so-story. We tend to take that point of view, but it's really just an artifact of observation bias.

Thank you for the thoughtful response! To use your own phrasing, it took me a hot minute to figure out what I think is the correct answer.