Pentagon Explores Quantum Biology

For years, military researchers have been exploring how the seemingly-improbable realm of quantum mechanics could impact information technology -- leading to faster, more powerful computers, next-gen radars and radios, and encryption that's all-but-impossible to break. Now, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm is starting to look at how quantum mechanics might impact biology, as well.

Darpa's Defense Sciences Office has announced a workshop to discuss "innovative research that will investigate the way that nature may be exploiting quantum mechanical effects in biological systems." And of course, they need an acronym to do it. So get ready for "QuBE," short for "Quantum Effects in Biological Environments."

Scientists have recently discovered that quantum energy transfers allow plants and cynobacteria to convert sunlight into chemical energy nearly instantly, and with almost 100 percent efficiency. "As energy passes between molecules involved in photosynthesis, a newly observed 'wavelike characteristic' allows the energy to 'simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one,'" our Wired Science co-bloggers observe. They liken it to the "sci-fi trope" in which "a digital consciousness" is split "into several 'forks' that simultaneously explore different courses of action before telling a central consciousness what to do."

Darpa says there are other biological examples of quantum effects -- including an explanation, perhaps, for how birds are able to navigate along the Earth's magnetic fields. The key may be the so-called "quantum Zeno effect," explains the* Physics ArXiv Blog*.

This is the watched-pot-never-boils effect on the qauntum scale.
It states that the act of observing a quantum system can alter its evolution in a way that maintains the state for longer than expected.

One well-known example is that it is possible to slow down the rate at which molecules convert from ortho to para isomers when they are constantly involved in collisions.

[Iannis Kominis at the
University of Crete] says a similar thing happens in birds: the presence of a geomagnetic field extends the lifetime of the singlet-triplet mixture from which the ions recombine. This gives the magnetic field time to bias the outcome of the recombination.

[Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]