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

I'm an avid reader of popular science books, particularly on physics and cosmology. I was impressed with the authors' ability to make the utterly counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics accessible to a lay audience. Phenomena I have never been able to grasp because they are so hard to describe outside of mathematical formulae were comprehensible for the first time. The idea of quantum effects explaining mysterious processes central to the generation, replication, and astoundingly efficient survival capabilities of living things is a tantalizing one. But the authors' whiz-bang excitement about the possibilities for synthetic life that our mastery of the quantum realm could generate did not endear me to their thesis or help to show more convince me of its credibility. They repeatedly quoted the great physicist Richard Feynman's dictum: "If I can't create it, I don't understand it." But unforeseen consequences, often negative, seem to dog many of these creations of science. They could be particularly severe with respect to living things. It's not a knee-jerk fear of science to feel that the authors were trying to hype a theory that still lacks conclusive experimental confirmation in almost every example they described, by selling us on all the cool stuff scientists might be able to create if they could learn exactly how quantum processes are used in living organisms. What they were in effect talking about, which unfortunately still seems to be the desideratum of many scientists, is a completely mechanical understanding of the universe and everything in it.

Perhaps fortunately, their theory is still a long way from such confirmation, although Life on the Edge seeks to make you believe it is only a matter of time before it comes. However, other scientists have noted that at both the smallest and largest scales, the universe appears resistant to our efforts to use mechanistic models to pin it down and thus to exert our dominance over it. While still being an avid fan of science, I have to hope that the questions posed in this book continue to mystify and frustrate us until we re-learn a little more respect, particularly for life and living things. show less

This is a good functional summary of the emerging field of quantum biology. It's hard not to see the fascination of quantum weirdness, but a lot of people are probably turned off by the remoteness of it from our classical physical world. This book smashes the two together with CERN-like force. We are quantum, it says. Everything is quantum. At the same time, this is the weakness of "Life on the Edge". By invoking quantum effects to explain so many and varied biological mysteries, the authors seem to protest too much. Sometimes (magnetoreception in migratory birds) there is very strong experimental evidence to support their case, and other times (origin of life) they freely admit that there isn't (yet). I don't begrudge them their show more enthusiasm - I suppose it's inevitable in such an emergent field - but I was left with the feeling that Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili would happily blame everything from earthquakes to the Easter Bunny on Quantum Biology, given half the chance. Recommended for its sheer novelty. show less

This is full of surprising information. I thought that the quantum world didn't interact much with the higher levels above. Then I saw a TV documentary (by Jim) about quantum effects in smell, and in bird navigation. This book expands on those things and covers other processes that are affected by quantum thing, e.g. photosynthesis. My take away by the end of the book is how complicated life is, even the "simple" one celled organisms are massively complicated, and we won't artificially create life any time soon.

Highly readable, revelatory, up-to-the-minute accounting of the strides made in a new science that have led to discoveries about heretofore unanswered questions in Nature. The authors argue that quantum mechanics is beginning to explain what life is and even how it arose.

Readers may struggle to comprehend terms like "superposition," "quantum tunneling," "quantum coherence," and quantum concepts like "entangled particles," or "action at a distance." But they should be able to glide along on the power of the narrative to appreciate how quantum biology untangled the mysteries of how enzymes get the tadpole to develop into a frog; how photosynthesis is such an efficient way for plants to get energy from sunlight; how the sense of smell show more requires more than specialized molecular detectors and relies on vibrations; how migrating birds, butterflies, and other creatures depend on biological compasses that allow them to find their way over long distances when quantum reactions take place in molecules of cryptochrome (a pigment found in some birds' and other animals' eyes) in the presence of Earth's weak magnetic field.

All that said, the most thrilling idea to be found in this book is the discussion of how DNA is able to replicate itself so accurately over thousand of years, preserving the genome of every living thing and guaranteeing the continuation and continuity of life.

I enjoyed a serendipitous coincidence in reading this book shortly after finishing Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind. McFadden and Al-Khalili delve into the mind-body problem to explore whether quantum mechanics can explain how conscious awareness (mind) can cause behavior (body) -- how ideas are turned into action.

The authors arranged each chapter with an introductory anecdote or story that illustrates the Question. This is followed by explanations of the biochemistry that drives biological reactions. They dig further into those reactions by discussing the exact quantum processes that are the basic foundation of those functions. The book ends on a happy note that is the crux of Life on the Edge: We can appreciate all the variety, the functions, the growth, movement, change, creativity, and "miraculous" fact of existence itself exhibited by our planets' flora and fauna as a result of "good, good, good, good (quantum) vibrations." show less

Professors McFadden and Al-Khalili, both at the University of Surrey, have given us an exciting romp through the 'weird' (their word) view of the field of quantum mechanics intersecting that of molecular biology (or perhaps its the other way around) to give us a new way of looking into the origins of life, evolution, genetic engineering, communication theory, even mind moving matter.
_Life on the Edge_ is framed by the migrations of a northern European robin, first flying from the spruce forests of Sweden with the first frosts of winter southward to the Mediterranean, and six months later, from the cedar tress in Tunisia northward to return to the Scandinavian spruce forest to find a mate, nest, raise chicks, and begin the cycle once show more again. How does the "magneto-reception" compass built into the robin's DNA enable it to find its way over thousands of migratory miles? This is the guiding question (and theme) of this marvelous book.

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This is an interesting book, obtained as a LibraryThing Early Reviewer. The authors delve into several seemingly unrelated biological topics, and show that a quantum physics explanation is necessary to understand them. The topics include basic functions of enzymes, photosynthesis, bird migration, scent receptors, and gene transcription.
They also propose a solution to one of the greatest ‘how did that ever happen’ questions in the origin of life – the numerous steps necessary to end up with functioning RNA as a precursor to DNA. This is necessary to answer astronomer Fred Hoyle’s ‘tornado in a junkyard creating a functioning 747’ argument, a strong argument for some sort of design from a primordial soup on earth.
The show more problem:
“Chemists are able to synthesize the RNA bases from simple chemicals by going through a very complex series of carefully controlled reactions in which each desired product from one reaction is isolated and purified before taking it on to the next reaction. The Scottish chemist Graham Cairns-Smith estimated that there are about 140 steps necessary for the synthesis of an RNA base from simple organic compounds likely to have been present in the primordial soup. For each step there is a minimum of about six alternative reactions that need to be avoided. This makes the chemical synthesis easy to visualize, for you can conceive of each molecule as a kind of molecular die, with each step corresponding to a throw where the number six represents generating the correct product and any other number indicates that the wrong product has been made. So, the odds of any starting molecule eventually being converted into RNA is equivalent to throwing a six 140 times in a row.”
These odds are vanishingly small, of course, and might as well be zero. Yet we are here, nonetheless.
The answer, according to the authors, as far as I can understand, is that on the quantum level all particles are in all possible states at once, continuously, and once some sort of prebiotic life was viable the quantum ‘wave’ collapsed into the world of classical physics we are all more comfortable with. A world-wide experiment of the wave-particle duality around four billion years old!
Other interesting conclusions are that many migratory species, such as birds, can see the earth’s magnetic field. Enzymes (substances that allow chemical reactions to occur at lower energy levels than they otherwise would) work via quantum effects. The photosynthesis process is nearly 100% efficient at the cellular level, again due to quantum effects. Finally, almost as an aside, the author’s allow that quantum computing may prove impossible, as it may be too difficult to avoid the ‘observer’s effect’ on wave/particle duality.

Five stars. show less

This is definitely not summer reading, but is well written and thought provoking. The authors provide stories to begin each chapter that illustrate a familiar behavior, discuss the basic science involved and then how quantum biology does (or might) provide explanations or mechanisms, including quantum coherence, entanglement and tunnelling. The writing is clear and there are many examples provided that help to illustrate the difficult concepts involved. The authors convey a deep knowledge of quantum biology as well as an infectious enthusiasm for the field. I was impressed with the frequent cross-references to earlier (or later) chapters where theory was discussed or examples provided –books like this often seem to be written show more chapter-by-chapter, with redundant material and a lack of overall cohesiveness—it is clear that the authors and editors went out of their way to avoid this. Was I convinced that these quantum ideas could explain things about processes like migration, hearing, smell, consciousness, etc.? Not always, but the ideas are intriguing, some of the evidence was compelling and it does open up an entirely different approach to how biological processes might work. show less