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Biophysics of Life: Biophotons, Light, Quantum Biology, Regeneration & Cancer | Nirosha Murugan | 227
https://mindandmatter.substack.com/p/biophysics-of-life-biophotons-lightÂ
Embedded Files
Biophysics of Life - Dr. Narashima Murugan
Biophotons Are Endogenously Produced Light Signals
Biophotons are emitted by cells during metabolic processes, particularly via mitochondrial activity and lipid peroxidation.
These ultra-weak photon emissions (UPEs) span wavelengths from UV to infrared and may carry biological information.
Mitochondria Are Key Sources of Biophotons
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated in mitochondria release energy as photons when electrons return to ground states.
Higher metabolic activity, such as during wound healing or neural firing, correlates with increased biophoton production.
Microtubules May Act as Light Waveguides
Tubulin dimers in microtubules absorb UV light and exhibit helical structures that could propagate photons.
Experiments suggest microtubules might function similarly to fiber-optic cables, directing light within cells.
Opsins Exist in Deep Brain Structures
Light-sensitive proteins like opsins are found in brain regions not exposed to external light.
This implies endogenous light or deeply penetrating external light may play a role in neural communication.
Light Influences Cellular Communication Beyond Vision
Non-visual light wavelengths (e.g., red/near-infrared) regulate processes like circadian rhythms and wound healing.
Photoreceptors in unexpected body locations suggest evolutionary adaptation to light-based signaling.
Water’s Biophysical Role Extends Beyond Biochemistry
Coherent water structures may absorb and re-emit light, influencing cellular energy dynamics.
Water’s thermal properties help maintain body temperature and infrared light interactions.
Optogenetics Reveals Unintended Light Effects
Control experiments in optogenetics show minor neural activity changes even without channelrhodopsin.
This suggests endogenous light sensitivity or unintended photobiomodulation effects in neural tissue.
Photobiomodulation Enhances Healing
Red/near-infrared light accelerates wound healing by boosting mitochondrial ATP production.
Light therapy reduces inflammation and promotes angiogenesis, aiding tissue repair.
Biophoton Emissions Detect Neural Activity
Photon detectors in hyperdark chambers measure weak light emissions from human brains during cognitive tasks.
Emissions correlate with task-specific neural activity but do not map 1:1 with electrical signals (EEG).
Cancer Cells Emit Distinct Biophoton Signatures
Melanoma cells emit more blue-shifted photons than healthy cells, reflecting altered metabolic states.
These optical fingerprints could enable non-invasive cancer detection via wavelength analysis.
Regeneration Relies on Physical and Chemical Cues
Mechanical stiffness of silk hydrogels and growth factors (e.g., BDNF) jointly induce limb regeneration in frogs.
Physical microenvironment cues (e.g., vibration) influence stem cell differentiation and tissue repair.
Schrodinger’s "What is Life?" Guides Biophysics
Life organizes energy and information through structured constraints, merging physics and biology.
First principles like energy transformation and material properties define biological systems.
Electromagnetic Fields Affect Biological Systems
Incubators have electromagnetic gradients that may introduce variability in cell culture experiments.
Applied magnetic fields alter microtubule alignment, suggesting cells respond to physical signals.
Noise vs. Signal in Biological Systems
Spontaneous neural activity may encode unrecognized information rather than random noise.
Biophoton scattering in tissues complicates distinguishing functional signals from metabolic byproducts.
Modern Light Environments Impact Health
Artificial light (e.g., cool vs. warm LEDs) disrupts natural photic cues tied to metabolism and behavior.
Chronic exposure to non-native light spectra may contribute to metabolic and circadian disorders.
Quantum Dots and Fiber Optics in Bioengineering
Quantum dots and biocompatible fiber-optic cables enable precise light detection in biological tissues.
These tools bridge physics and biology, allowing real-time monitoring of biophoton dynamics.
Myelin Sheaths as Dielectric Metamaterials
Myelin’s jelly-roll structure influences electrical and photonic signal propagation in axons.
Its insulating properties may guide light transmission alongside electrical impulses.
Energy Defines Biological Potential
Energy is the capacity for change, stored in chemical bonds, electrical gradients, and photon emissions.
Mitochondria convert energy into ATP, but photons may represent an additional energetic currency.
Biophotons Recruit Immune Cells
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) at wound sites emit light to attract neutrophils and macrophages.
Red light therapy amplifies immune recruitment, accelerating tissue repair.
Cancer as an Energetic Dysregulation
Cancer cells exhibit altered energy dissipation, favoring proliferation over tissue integration.
Metabolic shifts (e.g., Warburg effect) correlate with distinct biophoton emission patterns.
Faraday Cages Isolate Biophoton Signals
Hyperdark chambers with copper shielding minimize external electromagnetic interference.
These setups detect ultra-weak brain emissions (~1-100 photons/sec) linked to cognition.
Biophotons and Consciousness Hypotheses
Microtubule-guided photons might contribute to neural synchrony and conscious states.
Quantum biology theories propose photonic coherence as a mechanism for cognition.
UV Light and Mutation Risks
Endogenous UV photons from ROS may cause DNA damage, driving oncogenic mutations.
Cancer cells’ blue-shifted emissions suggest higher UV output and genomic instability.
Light Penetrates Deep Tissues
Long-wavelength light (e.g., near-infrared) reaches deep brain structures, influencing non-visual pathways.
This challenges assumptions that optogenetic light only affects surface neurons.
Evolution Shaped Light Sensitivity
Tubulin’s UV absorption implies evolutionary adaptation to endogenous or environmental light.
Deep-brain opsins suggest ancestral roles for light in primitive organisms without eyes.
Biophotons as Diagnostic Tools
Photon emission patterns differentiate healthy and diseased tissues in real time.
Machine learning analyzes wavelength/frequency data to classify cancer types.
Mechanotransduction Guides Regeneration
Physical forces (e.g., stiffness, vibration) activate piezo channels, influencing cell fate.
Silk hydrogels mimic embryonic mechanical environments to reactivate regenerative pathways.
Photoreception in Non-Visual Tissues
Skin and internal organs express opsins, responding to light for functions like vitamin D synthesis.
This broadens the definition of "photoreception" beyond retinal cells.
Biophoton Scattering Complicates Detection
Photons emitted deep in tissues are absorbed or scattered before reaching detectors.
Advanced imaging algorithms may reconstruct original emission sources from scattered signals.
Magnetic Fields Influence Cellular Alignment
Applied magnetic fields reorient microtubules, suggesting cells use geomagnetic cues.
This could explain migratory behaviors in organisms like birds or bacteria.
Thermal Noise and Biological Signals
Brownian motion in warm, wet cells creates background "noise" that may mask biophotons.
Biological systems likely filter noise to detect meaningful photonic signals.
Light Modulates Mitochondrial Function
Cytochrome c oxidase in mitochondria absorbs red light, boosting ATP production.
This explains photobiomodulation’s efficacy in enhancing cellular energy output.
Biophotons and Neurodegeneration
Altered biophoton emissions in Alzheimer’s models may reflect mitochondrial dysfunction.
Monitoring brain light signatures could enable early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.
Environmental EMFs Alter Cell Behavior
Electromagnetic gradients in labs affect stem cell differentiation and experimental reproducibility.
Standardizing EMF conditions may reduce variability in biomedical research.
Biophotonics in Space Health
Understanding Earth’s electromagnetic environment is critical for human space colonization.
Altered gravity and radiation in space may disrupt biophoton-mediated communication.
ROS: Double-Edged Sword in Biology
ROS generate biophotons for signaling but also cause oxidative damage if unregulated.
Antioxidant systems balance ROS levels to maintain beneficial photonic outputs.
Lumen Device Tracks Metabolic States
The Lumen device measures CO2 to assess fat/carbohydrate burning via breath analysis.
Personalized metabolic data helps optimize diet and exercise for energy efficiency.
Biophotons and Plant Stress Responses
Damaged plants emit biophotons to signal stress, attracting beneficial organisms.
This parallels immune signaling in animals, suggesting conserved light-based communication.
Quantum Biology in Early Research Stages
Tools to study quantum effects (e.g., entanglement) in biology are still under development.
Quantum dots and cryogenic sensors may soon reveal quantum processes in living systems.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration Drives Progress
Merging physics, engineering, and biology accelerates breakthroughs in biophotonics.
Innovations like fiber-optic neural interfaces exemplify the power of cross-disciplinary research.
TRANSCRIPT OF PODCAST
Whether food, drugs, or ideas, what you consume influences who you become. On the mind and matter podcast, we learn together from the best scientists and thinkers alive today about how your mind body reacts to what you feed it. Before starting mind and matter, I spent ten years in academia doing scientific research. I got a PhD PhD in neuroscience where I focused on neuro endocrinology and the neurobiology of behavior. And before that I specialized in molecular developmental and evolutionary genetics.
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Do you wanna just start off by telling everyone a little bit about who you are and what you study? Absolutely. So, yeah, my name is, Narashima Murugan. I'm an assistant professor here at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. My lab predominantly focuses on understanding the biophysical dimension of life.
We're trying to understand how optical, magnetic, and electric information is processed and integrated within the body to kind of help form shape and function and how we can leverage those signals for detection of diseases. And and so when you say the body, are you talking about the human body? Yeah. We're working primarily towards the human health side of things, but we do look at lower life forms in terms of slime mold, which we can probably get into that don't have neural systems. So we kind of look at it across scales, but predominantly within the human system.
Yeah. And so on the one hand, we all know, you know, very, very well from, from our lives that the physical world impinges on us. We we see things and and, you know, that is based on light and we hear things and that's based on sound waves. But but you said you said you look at optical inputs and you look at electrical and magnetic effects on humans. All of those things are are affecting the human body?
Absolutely. Yep. I mean, on various scales and various dimensions, the the electromagnetic spectrum itself encompasses light itself. So we're trying to understand really all of those like you said, all of the physical dimension affects the body. The the sun provides energy for us through, you know, plants and foods and things like that, but there's also information within these physical signals that really what I'm trying to tease apart is, like, we have these physical signals in our environment, but how are they interacting with our biology?
And is there any information within them in which we can kind of tap into to see how that happens? Mhmm. Yeah. And I think, you know, maybe part of what we'll get into is how a lot of these physical signals, various forms of electromagnetic energy can be detected and used used by the body beyond the ones that are obvious to most of us. So so if we start with, say, sunlight, for example, obviously we see you are visual creatures.
There's a visible spectrum of light, but then there's an invisible spectrum of light that extends way beyond the visible. And we know, for example, obviously that UV light is important. We can't see UV. Other organisms can, but it still affects us because, you know, we can get sunburned and things like that. But, you know, starting at a very high level, how does light, natural light from the sun, affect us and other animals beyond image formation?
What are some of the major ways that light is regulating biology? Excellent question. So we are all pretty familiar with the circadian aspects of, the sun entrainment in terms of regulating a lot of our body rhythms. So when the sun comes up and goes down, we have circadian entrainment. So there's parts of our brain, a suprachiasmatic nucleus that is tuned in to how much light that come that comes into our body.
And when we think about human health, we kind of see that disturbances, for example, in shift working. Individuals who shift work who are kind of out of alignment for the sun's rhythm, they kind of have a lot of these pathologies related to heart, gastrointestinal issues that come about. So that's more on, like, the the systems level, behavioral level scales. Now if you scale down to the cell and, you know, tissue level, we see that a lot of the chemical energy that fuels our cells from mitochondrial function is all derived from light itself. So there's energy within the sunlight that gets propagated in terms of food that gets broken down to these cellular processes.
Now what's also exciting that we're starting to see is that the like you mentioned, the non visible spectrum of light, so the red to near infrared is also very important for a lot of our molecular synthesis. We see that, you know, vitamin d, for example, the we can't make vitamin d on our own without the help of of external light. But also we're starting to see that wound healing. A lot of these molecular signaling function is all also all regulated by light. And, I'm we can kinda get into it a little bit more, but if we look into the the molecular landscape of how receptors are distributed within our body, there are these receptors on all of our cells that are receptive to light.
And they're in deep structures, for example, within our brain where we expect to see no light, deep structures within our body cavities that we expect to see no light. And that kind of begs the question, why are they there? If there are photoreceptors, are they involved in something more than just making vitamin d and then training these body rhythms? So Mhmm. That's kind of like what I think this movement is going towards, which is super exciting.
Yeah. Yeah. So so if I'm hearing you correctly, you know, obviously, we've got photoreceptors. We've got specialized structures in our eyeballs that allow us to detect light. And, you know, that part's obvious.
Everyone knows that. And then the surface of our skin is light sensitive. Right? The the lightness and darkness of our skin changes in response to how much sunlight we get. Obviously, we can get sunburn.
But what you're saying is, like, deeper within the body, the our cells seem to have quite, a lot of ability, a lot of, detectors for light in places that we don't ordinarily think light is even getting. Exactly. Yeah. So deep brain structure, they have these proteins called opsins receptors. There's different kinds of opsins that are receptive to different wavelengths of light.
So some of them are leading towards the UV melanopsins that are within, again, deep brain structures that we see. So the fact that there are receptors, neuroopsins, all of these different various kinds of variants of these opsin proteins, they are distributed heterogeneously within the body. So suggesting that there's some sort of evolutionary aspect of how we evolve to these wavelengths of light and how they're involved in terms of maybe internal communication. Yeah. Yeah.
So so we have opsins. We have light detector proteins deep literally in the middle of our brains. And so if I if I sort of map out the space of possibilities here, there's maybe two or three things to come to mind, and then I'll I'll sort of let you direct us where where the evidence is taking us. One reason we could have these light sensitive proteins deep in the middle of our brain is that, well, it's just a coincidence. They've evolved for some other reason and they happen to be light sensitive, but that's not really what they evolved for.
Another reason, could be that somehow light from the outside world is getting in there, even though it's deep within us. So maybe we've got long wavelengths of light that penetrate deeply in, and we are literally detecting with these options and things, external light from the sun or from wherever that actually does get all the way inside of us. And then the third, a possibility here that I think you'll be able to speak to is there could actually be light produced inside of us. It's it's endogenously produced. And so, you know, is is that roughly the space of possibilities there?
Is there something I'm missing? And and what do we know about what these options and things are doing deep inside of us? Absolutely. I think the point 2.3, the fact that there's external light, different wavelengths, the the issue of penetration has always been a topic of discussion in this space, but also internal light. So it kind of points towards yes.
We are evolved in this ball of fire, but what about what's literally happening inside of us? There is, there's clear evidence that there's light being, generated from inside of our inside of our body, inside of ourselves. Perhaps those are why these receptors have evolved to detect and be involved in that communication. Yeah. Okay.
So light is being produced endogenously inside of us and other organisms. In other words, if we were to go into a truly dark room that had zero external light coming in, we would actually, with the appropriate sensors and detectors, we would actually be able to detect photons being produced from the cells of the organism itself. Yes. And this has been well established now. You know, we are, we are pioneering this space, but this has been shown for over a century now with the original Alexander Gurwitz experiments with onion roots showing that, you know, they didn't have the fancy detectors that we did, but they showed that if you have light impervious, impermeable materials like glass or quartz, you can kind of prevent cells from growing, onion root cells from growing.
And there's no chemicals that are being emitted from onion roots, so it must be something physical. So the conclusion they came with that it must be UV, light that's being emitted because of the barrier that they used to prevent it from getting from one side to the other. But beyond those original experiments, several people have shown using the light detectors that these cells and tissues and us, humans, plants, all living biology emit light. The big question that we are trying to solve as a community now is there information in that light? Can we actually use that light emission to read what's happening internally?
Yeah. Yeah. So so it's unquestionably true that these what do you call them? Indogenous photons, biophotons? How do you talk about this?
The the terms have been thrown around over the last century. Biophotons, ultra weak photon emissions. Now there's a movement towards autoluminescence. So all of those just means unstimulated light. So this is not luminescence in the sense that it's not produced by, a a luminescent biochemical reaction.
It's not light that's going in and being converted into another wavelength. Yeah. These are endogenous photons that are created from, proteins changing, resonant frequencies, things like that. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's truly endogenously produced. It doesn't depend on an external light source coming in. So these biophotons get made and, you know, maybe they get made as a side effect of something else going on and they're just sort of, I don't want to say waste product, but they might not be doing anything. But as you've alluded, they might, we might be really, they might be doing something functionally. There might be information there and the systems may have evolved to not just emit, but detect these things in order to drive various aspects of biology.
I'm sure we're going to go there, but let's start with basic mechanisms. What are some of the basic ways that these biophotons get produced in, in living things? Doctor. Right. And so that's been, again, another topic of discussion.
So this, this entire space of biophotons has been pretty rocky until pretty recently. And the reason for that are the tools that we need. In the genomic landscape, we've kind of made substantial strides in how we understand that side. With biophotons, the caveat that I wanna, kinda put out there in our discussion as early as possible is that we're limited based on our tools and what we can do and what we can understand, especially things of scale. So if we're thinking about where these photons come from, we have to think about the scale.
Are they coming from organelles, proteins? Are they coming from subatomic units, electrons? But what we know as a consensus, what we can agree with is that it's tied to the energetic landscape of the cells. So if we look within the powerhouse of the cell of, as we colloquially call them the mitochondria, as the mitochondria function and they release these highly energetic molecules called reactive oxygen species, that is what we're associating the emission of light. So there's highly, energetic states of electrons that get to a certain level when they return back to ground state is when these photons get admitted.
So it's a continuous reaction of reactive oxygen species. There's some really good evidence now that's showing lipid peroxidation. So the breakdown of fats is also another, source of these photons. Ultimately, you're not gonna get photons with without, changing ground level states of electronic values. Yeah.
Yeah. So I guess that that's basic physics stuff. And if if I'm hearing you correctly, there's good reason to think, you know, based on what we know about physical chemistry that, you know, photons are gonna get admitted as the metabolism of life is happening. But because it's probably very, very difficult technically to look deep, deep, deep inside a cell, it sounds like we're, there's still a lot of fuzziness in terms of like exactly where all of these photons are coming from, the exact chemical reactions, the exact organelles, the exact places within cells. Exactly.
The the body, the biology, it's messy. It's warm. So when we're thinking about physics, we have to think about all of these variables, temperature, the stochasticity of the state system itself. So when things are emitted, there's always going to be by things, I mean, light is emitted. There's always gonna be environmental absorption as well.
So Yeah. What we detect from our detectors on the outside is gonna be a subcomponent of what the biology is absorbing in its environment. Water is a great one. Yeah. Coherent water is another one that that is involved in the absorption of light.
Yeah. So so, basically, you know, biophotons can get produced and emitted, but by the time your detector as a scientist measures them, they've bounced around. They've been absorbed. They've been reflected through all of the milieu of of the cell. Correct.
Yeah. And so that's that's kind of what we're trying to tease apart is, you know, what is being absorbed? Is it being absorbed and then re emitted? Is there a change in wavelength? Is there a change in frequency?
It's all of these domains that need to kind of really get addressed before what we actually pick up. Mhmm. And you mentioned water there, and you said coherent water. And I'm not even quite sure what that means. But what can you say about water in terms of what it might be doing in a biophysical sense?
So, obviously, water is necessary for life. We need to drink water. We know that there's all sorts of hydrolysis and chemical reactions that require water, and that's a big part of what water is used for. But is water doing something more biophysical and not just biochemical in ourselves? Great question.
And let's think about that for a quick second. So you mentioned hydrolysis. It's and even within the mitochondria creating the fact that you're creating energy produces water. It produces something fundamental to life. So when things are fundamental, they've evolved and to form structure.
And what's really exciting on the physical nature of water itself, you have the production of protons, you have the production of these negative ions, so there's a distribution of charge. From the physical landscape, it produces bioelectricity essentially across membranes and and things like that. The other important things in terms of water, in terms of physics, is it it's a thermal insulator. So it's going to absorb infrared light and help maintain the, thermal landscape so that biology can function. So there's a reason why we function at 37.5 degrees as as a as a unit.
Water helps maintain that. I also mentioned infrared. So this is kind of like the speculative nature. So, yes, thermal regulation, Brownian noise is maintained at that point. But is that also a source for us to absorb a certain amount of light that doesn't get propagated and bounced around to affect signaling?
And that's sort of the speculative nature on the light dimension that light, that water is associated with as well. What, you know, there's a lot of different ways to to go with this. Let's let's first talk more about the ultra weak photon emissions that, that you've worked on and that others have seen. So let's just define or redefine again for people. What are these ultra weak photon emissions and what does, I don't know, you can talk about your research or just the field more broadly, but where's sort of the focus right now in terms of the wavelengths that, that are being measured by people like you and, and where in the cells and in the body the action seems to be, if there's any special place.
So just to kind of set the tone, ultra weak photon emissions, UPEs, biophotons, they're usually within the visible wavelength, so about two eighty nanometer UV all the way up to IR. In terms of source, we kind of briefly mentioned mitochondria. We mentioned also, lipid peroxidation. But there's a lot of individuals who are also showing that microtubules, are also another important game, players here in the biophoton community in the sense that not only do they emit photons, but they also help propagate it. So the once you have light, they need to be restructured and moved from place to place within the cell.
And, there's implication for consciousness, which you don't have to get into right now that we can talk about later. In terms of photon emissions that are being actively studied within the human body, the first, place that a lot of people point to is the brain. Mhmm. Why? It's one of the energetic most energetic organs within the body.
So it's pretty, useful to kind of modulate the energetic landscape and look at photon emissions. And people have looked at this from cells and the neurons in a dish all the way up, to what we do within, human, subjects. Mhmm. So, also I kind of want to mention some of the work that's been done to actually validate this work to show that we can do this within, the visible spectrum is in plants. They've shown that if you tear a leaf, damage a leaf, wound it, that you do get these photonic bursts, that are associated with reactive oxygen species.
So it's a lot of correlative mechanisms that have been shown that if you induce damage that causes ROS, you do get photon emissions within the visible spectrum. I see. So that's kind of the current landscape right now that everyone is in consensus with. I see. So biophotons get produced.
They're often the visible spectrum, but a variety of wavelengths can be produced. They are pretty clearly associated with, let's just call it heavy metabolic activity. So that's gonna implicate the mitochondria where a lot of metabolism is happening. That's why you've mentioned already a couple of times things like wound healing and damage. Anytime anytime you need anabolic signals and more metabolism to build up structure to to fix it, or or I would presume to develop it in the first place, there seems to be, more biophotons produced in those types of situations.
Yeah, absolutely. And, there's some fantastic work that's being done to actually show the specificity of these photons to cell types. If we are coming to the conclusion that it's metabolism based, we know that, you know, various cells are under different metabolic stressors and thresholds, and we're starting to see that those photons signals, those light signals seem to match those energetic landscapes. Mhmm. And so this is gonna be a really fun conversation for me and hopefully the audience because unlike most of my guests, for most of my guests, I have some reasonably good to very good background in the stuff we're talking about.
So, you know, so I have a lot to draw on. But with your stuff in the biophysics, I have much less of a background. So hopefully, that means I'm gonna ask, naive but good questions. And it also means I have a lot more genuine questions. So for example, you said something a moment ago.
You said you're talking about microtubules, and you were talking about moving light around. I'm not even sure exactly what that means. What do you mean by moving light around? Great question. And, first step is that light's being generated.
Mhmm. If we're assuming that this light is not just spurious, it's not just background that's coming out of metabolic activity, it's involved in meaningful signaling, just like a gene that needs to get from the nuclei all the way to the Golgi apparatus to become a protein. Yes. There are these trafficking mechanisms that move these things, molecules around. And so if light is going to be involved in certain meaningful communication, once it gets produced by the mitochondria, how does it get to where it needs to go?
And there's the implication that the microtubule, the way that it's structured, the tubulin dimers are structured is that they can propagate just like, you know, like these dinosins in microtubules that they can potentially move and propagate that light from point a to point b. Almost like a fiber optic. And this is something that's correct. And I I'm so happy you said that because that's exactly kinda what we're working on in the lab is that we're looking at aligned neurons, axons, and seeing how much of light if we put light in, how much light comes out. And if it's like an acting like a fiber optic cable, it should be a hundred percent efficiency or or near there.
But if it's spurious and this is not really a propagation system, not like fiber optic cable, we should get nothing. Wow. So I'm just gonna say this now to to remind us for later. Maybe we'll come back to this. But as someone who used to do a lot of optogenetics experiments where we're shooting blue light into the brain, when you read all those papers, and and I put myself back in in those days, we always made the explicit assumption.
We don't have blue light sensitive stuff in our brain. And therefore, when we put in this light, it's only having our experimental effect, and and therefore, we're not, it's not having some other effect we can't account for. Maybe that's not the case. We'll come back to that. So micro two let's just start very basic here.
You're saying you can potentially traffic, actively traffic light around to serve a signaling purpose. So by analogy, you know, there's biochemical signaling systems in our cells. There's receptors, they're bound by other things. We have signal transduction pathways that take you from, say, the external part of the cell to the internal part of the cell to the nucleus. You might turn on a gene or start transcribing it more.
That gene product then has to be actively shuttled somewhere else in the cell to make the protein. Like there's a lot of active regulation and shuttling around of biochemistry, let's say. And you're saying that perhaps something similar is happening, not with chemicals, not with molecules, but with light itself, that that microtubules and other structures might be structured. They might be there in part to shuttle around light for information signaling purposes. That's that's the assumption that we're trying to validate.
And neuroanatomy and looking at microstructures of neurons kind of gave us the hint to kind of explore this route. So we look at the structure of our neuron. We see, at the axon hillock, and you have the myelin sheath, and you have nodes, nodes of NVA where there is no myelin. And what's really interesting, if you actually look at those spaces, they have a high density of, my mitochondria in that space. Mhmm.
So, typically, when we when we look at neuroscience, we understand the electrical dynamics. Yes. That produces an action potential. That's great. And that's one source of information that gets passed down.
So we are we've accepted that electrical information can be transformed into molecular and synaptic transmission. That's what we call that now. But if we look again at that note of trend that note of Ranvier, we have mitochondria. And if and mitochondria produce light. So the assumption there is that the light that's being produced along those nodes are propagated perhaps through the microtubule along the myelin, that it perhaps is involved in facilitating some other level of communication, but this is all that needs to get validated.
And kind of towards that area, the myelin itself is an insulative property electrically, but it also is an absorber of light as well. So there's sort of this dynamics between what's getting propagated and what's getting absorbed, but we need the tools again to kind of figure out at that scale what kinds of emissions that we're looking at. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some interesting possibilities here in terms of the information carrying function that light could have.
Like, we're we're saying could, maybe. There's lots of stuff that needs to be validated. Let's just talk about the raw sort of biophysics of this. Can you speak a little bit about the molecular architecture of microtubules and what we know for sure about their ability to transduce light signals and move it around? Absolutely.
So the microtubules produced from dimers of tubulin themselves are are highly polymerized and they form this helical structure. So the the helical structure itself maintains rigidity, these the cytoskeletal integrity that we need to maintain cells. From a photonics point of view, they absorb they being tubulin dimers themselves absorb within the UV wavelength. Mhmm. So which is really unique to any macromolecule that exists within the within the body because as we know, UV is a high energy photon.
So to be able to absorb without damage is a pretty unique nature to Tubulin. So that's what we know in terms of how tubulin is involved on the optics on the photonic side. And the helical nature is what helps propagate that photon. I see. Because those vibrational frequencies are match the the UV wavelength, the there's resonance within the microtubule domain that's within the megahertz to terahertz range.
So there's a internal resonance frequency or, you know, oscillation that's always happening within these microtubules that we're starting to understand is coupled to light. I see. So everyone understands UV light's high energy light. There's you know, it's very energetic. What you're saying, if I think about this as an evolutionary biologist, the microtubule dimers, the component pieces that make up the microtubules, they are capable of absorbing UV light.
And UV light, as we said, is high energy. The fact that there are structured microtubules to absorb that light without being destroyed or damaged suggests that they evolved in the presence of a fair amount of UV light, even deep within the, the brain and body where UV light from the outside is not getting in. And so that would imply that they evolved in the presence of UV light that was presumably produced quite locally to where these structures are located. Mhmm. I mean, that that would be a good strong evidence for it.
We also see this that when you depolymerize, so you break apart the structure, each individual tubulin monomer at that point is not able to move around light, obviously, because it's not structured. But the absorption also changes in terms of how much energy each individual, monomer can absorb. So it's the full network that's involved in absorbing this high energy unit. Mhmm. And it would be really interesting to see, you know, how evolutionarily this would have happened.
The sun has though the sun has always been around in terms of our our lifetime, the energetics of the sun in terms of the wavelengths and helio disturbances could also imply, you know, evolutionary changes into how these microtubules and how these proteins have been made. Mhmm. So, you know, you gave us the raw biophysical fact that these tubulin dimers can absorb UV light. That's interesting, and perhaps we can talk more about that. I wanna how far does this fiber optic cable analogy go?
Are there wavelengths of light that can sort of travel through the microtubules and get from one part of the cell to another? Has that been observed? No. To my knowledge, not sure. These are experiments that we're actually ongoing right now.
And we're using actually different species of spinal cords. As we know that different spinal cords from different species are aligned differently. Their microtubule and their alignment in terms of their axon distribution, their myelination is also different. This allows us to probe to the question exactly that you're asking. What's the wavelength that gets propagated?
How far do they go? Do you is there a reason why we need to have nodes to continually produce light? So it you know, you get little bursts of light that get, like a Morse code of light, let's say, in terms of activity. But these are all things that were ongoing right now in our lab. Mhmm.
Mhmm. So microtubules, when you learn about them in school, what they're most famous for is they're, you know, they're part of the cytoskeleton of the cell. They are physical structures that give cells their shape and their rigidity. They're important for, like the cell cycle. So when a cell divides and pulls from one cell into two cells, the microtubules are important cell skeleton structures that have that sort of physical, spatial function to them.
Are there any observations that we've made over the years in neurons or in any other cells where, you know, the microtubules seem to be in the cell in a way that can't be explained by just serving as a, as a a skeleton for the cell? Is there anything that that people like you have looked at them and said, okay, these microtubules seem to be in this part of the cell, and they're sort of oriented in a way that we can't really just explain away with, you know, they're a structural component of the cell or they're gonna help the cell cycle or something like that. That's a great question again. And, what's exciting is that, you know, much like the mitochondria that has been, you know, coined as the powerhouse of the cell, and we're starting to see that it does more than that. The, the microtubule kind got, like, a bad rap in the sense that it's just structural.
Yeah. But it's definitely more than just structural. We see this also in magnetic stimulation. For example, when in researchers have shown that if you apply certain intensities of magnetic fields or electric fields, these microtubules move and they align. So the fact that they it's not just that they are there for structure, just for support beams, they seem to be responsive to applied physical signals.
So that kinda then begs the question, are they moving and providing structure because of environmental signals? And they're they're kind of then altering cell signaling, or is it vice versa? So they they are kind of like a physical antenna to propagate external physical signals. Electrical, magnetic have been shown, and now we're trying to see, is it photonic as well? And so what what are some of these experiments look like?
And, do we have the technical ability to really get firm answers to this stuff yet? And, like, what do you think what do you think sort of the landscape of discovery will plausibly look like the next few years in terms of nailing down what some of these biophotons might be functionally doing inside of cells? Oh, I'm so glad that you asked that because, you know, as as people are listening, I wanna think about and have them think about how we can build these innovative devices. What we when we've presented this work at many different quantum conferences where there's physicists and biologists, and there's always been a disconnect in terms of biologists. We know we know we need molecular tools so we can see and measure and quantify.
The physicist asked the question, what's the scale and what's the setbacks you need? Like, what's the temperature setbacks? You know? These light detectors, they're made for room temp. But when we stick it into an incubator, they fail.
So there's some of these innovative gaps that need to be made. So when we think about using these physical tools at biological temperatures and scales and c o two and all of that is one gap that we really need to fill. In terms of, you know, your question that you asked about how do we know, how do we visualize this, we're taking molecular tools that we understand in terms of imaging, for example. Imaging gives us a snapshot, and we're thinking about physics. A lot of the time scale gaps is something that we also need to fill.
The photon, the speed of light, you know, are we ever gonna get a detector that can measure the speed of light? Not sure, but we can look at some some, harmonic away from it. So, I mean, that that's something that I I'm really passionate about and really wanna fill is the tech development in this space to help measure the physical and quantum processes. Yeah. Yeah.
I think what you're speaking to here is, you know, for those who don't know, you know, very very often in science, there's this exciting and iterative dance that happens between, discovery. So we're talking about this applies to any field, I guess, but in biology, right, you, you, you discover some stuff about biology, but then that also makes you realize, oh, we don't have the technical tools that allow us to really understand the next step. And then you have to have tech development and that enables the next level of discovery. And then, you know, this sort of process just repeats. Sounds like compared to say molecular biology in the classic sense, this area of biophysics and biophotonics is at an earlier stage of this dance.
And you're just starting to develop some of the tools that allow us to really start to measure things. But, but it it's relatively early days. Absolutely. And and, you know, as biologists and scientists in general, we try to be creative and repurpose tools from other fields. You know, we're using PMTs that are photomultiplier tubes and detectors that are used for telescopes to looking at the stars, microscope to looking at, you know, individual cell protein dynamics in terms of fluorescence.
But we there's still setbacks into into those. And some new tools that were are being developed right now to get to the idea of fiber optics are neurons, fiber optic bio biological sensors. So there's some some engineering development that needs to happen in this space. And with the way that biomedical engineering is going right now, it's it's it's a good time to make this movement happen a lot faster than it it had in the past. Mhmm.
Can you give us a sense for some of the tools that have been or are being developed? What what do they look like, and what exactly are they doing? Absolutely. So for example, quantum dots. When people think of photons and quantum, they think of quantum dots, which are typically used to visualize, biological cells or biological proteins, but they are working again at a stimulation.
So you have to put in light to measure out light. One new development that's been happening at a company out of Quebec is interfacing fiber optic cables that are typically used in telecommunications, but interfacing them with biology. And to be able to stick a fiber optic cable inside of an axon, you need to create connectors that are biologically compatible. Mhmm. And so those are some biomedical engineering tools that are being developed to interface silicon based stuff into wet messy biology stuff.
So so it sounds if I'm hearing you right, people are developing literal physical fiber optics made in such a way that, say, if you put them into a biological tissue, like a brain, they will be good at picking up the photons that are produced in that, in that, tissue. And so in contrast to something like optogenetics, which is now widely, widely used in in neuroscience and and other fields, you're not you're not using the fiber fiber optics to introduce light to do something. You're trying to just detect what's in there already. Exactly. And, you know, like you said, optogenetics has come a long way from from where it has been.
And if we kind of go back to what you alluded to at the beginning Mhmm. If you look at optogenetic data, and this is something that I noticed when I in grad school, is that even the, you know, the the conditions that don't have the rhodopsins in them, the undistributed, just just the control conditions, there's an effect. And there's always been an effect. And they're low, and usually some people kinda throw out that data and say, oh, you know, this is an artifact or something. The the the effects are low, obviously, compared to the channel rhodopsin, conditions.
Yeah. But that kind of begs the effect that the cells are still responsive to some level of these very intense lights. Yeah. And let's let's talk about what some of those let let let's unpack this a little bit for people. So, what what is optogenetics and how does it work in the traditional channel wraps and blue light sense?
Let's let's do that first and then go to what some of these artifacts could be. Sure. So optogenetics, is the use of light to modulate, molecular landscapes, but it's involving the use of a very specific, genetic sequence, channelrhodopsin, a protein that is responsive to light. So they couple it usually to, another gene sequence that they wanna upregulate or downregulate. And just like a switch in the presence of light, those genes get expressed.
Mhmm. So typically, that's what, optogenetics is. It's been it like you said, it's widely used from neuroscience all the way down to to protein chemistry. So, does that is that a good enough explanation? Yeah.
Yeah. So basically, you know, over a decade ago now, some people realized, Karl Deisseroth and Ed Boyden and others, that, you know, there's organisms that naturally are sensitive to blue light and other wavelengths of light, like certain bacteria. And they have these special ion channels that are sensitive to blue light and they open. So they basically said, well, let's stick these into neurons in a mammal and then stick a fiber optic into that animal's brain. And long story short, they figured out and now people use all the time.
You you can stick blue light into the brain of an animal, like a mouse, that's expressing channelrhodopsin specific neurons and control those neurons. But now what I'm coming through with you is that, the assumption there is that that blue light isn't doing anything except activating channelrhodopsin, to use this one example. Because the assumption, the presumption is that, our brains are not naturally sensitive to these wavelengths of light. But what you said is, actually, if you look at the control conditions in these experiments, you actually do see that something is happening that, you know, may be small and is often dismissed, but it starts to get us to this idea of, well, is this blue light doing something even in the absence of channelrhodopsin? Mhmm.
Mhmm. Yep. And, I mean, that kind of leads really well into a field that's now becoming well established, which is the photobiomodulation community. So photobiomodulation, those are, using light without having a genetic construct inside of the biological tissue, so it's just the application of light. With with optogenetics, it's just, quite interesting to see that how these high energy lights are producing some effect within, within the neurons, in terms of what they mean or, or how it's getting propagated.
It goes back to what we originally talked about is we need the tools to kind of help understand how all of this happens. Mhmm. But just looking at the experiments at face value, like when you were a grad student, what did you notice? So in the control condition, when they don't have say channelrhodopsin, but they put in blue light, what what do they see? So in these very specific experiments, they were they're neural activity based.
We saw there's a change in membrane potential. I see. So change in membrane potential. There was also change in calcium influx. Though small, again, negligible.
There's, it's still, not similar to background. So Yeah. There's some effect, but we don't know why or how. Okay. Interesting.
And so And I I just also wanna sorry. I just wanna also point out, usually, when these lights are stimulated, these light trains, the the the pattern in which these lights are stimulated, they're usually high frequency, and they're sine waves. So they're just really repetitive oscillations that happen. What we're starting to know and what we actually already know in neuroscience, a lot of the electrical firing that happens within the brain is patterned. For example, long term potentiation that's typically associated with memory formation has a very specific burst firing of of activity.
And so when I was in grad school and saw this optogenetic effects with the sine waves, kind of brought us to the question, what if we patterned that light to match something that's biological? So we know that electrical activity has a certain pattern of firing. Why don't we match the application of what we put in to that firing? And we've done this work with blue light and red light, and we see that we can alter biological activity by just changing the pattern of light going inside. So kind of putting those two concepts together that, you know, we see that in control conditions and optogenetics, there's some change that happen.
And if we take it a step further by adding pattern to what we put in, we can get more specificity in how we interact with those neurons is, again, giving us a more of a story, a more maybe complete story that neurons and biological tissue are receptive to light that's beyond just accidental noise. Mhmm. Mhmm. And so if if biophotons there's there seems to be a relationship between biophoton production and metabolism. Brain tissue is a highly metabolically intensive type of tissue.
There's lots of mitochondria. There's lots of biochemistry that's going on here that's probably producing these biophotons. One thing that I think you've worked on that seems like an interesting area of tech development is whether, you know and everything I just said sort of implies that there's going to be a systematic relationship between biophoton production and neural activity. And therefore, I would imagine you could develop, technology that enabled you to detect biophotons as a readout of neural activity. What's going on in that space?
So, yeah, you alluded to it, and we we published this paper not too long ago, from human subjects that we have developed a tool to pick up brain photons from living subjects, and try to couple them to their cognitive state. So, much like the development and evolution of electroencephalography, so looking at the electrical signals that are coming out from the brain, we try to stimulate or simulate that development using light. So we had, developed a system where we had multiple sensors, photon detector sensors that are placed around the head, at very strategic places based on the task that we wanted the participant to be engaged in, that we expected to be more activity, and looked at what is coming out at various times in their in their process. And and how do you That was the question that we wanted to address. Yeah.
How do you actually do that? Specifically, what are you detecting here in terms of the biophotons? Like, how sensitive is the signal? What exactly are you measuring coming out? Great question.
So the first big hurdle is how do we do this in a environment where we're covered with light? Mhmm. How do we pick up these very, very weak signals? And to give you, sort of like an analogy, we are picking up about, 10 to a hundred photons per second, which is a thousand times weaker than the less moonlight on a very dim moonlight day. Yeah.
Yeah. So it's very, very, very subtle, very, very weak. And so we have developed a what we call a hyperdark chamber, which is a room that is very, very dark. It's a room within a room. No lights inside of this room, and all of our grad students are pretty dark adapted now in in this space.
Along with this, the room is also, lined with magnet with copper, so it's also a giant Faraday cage. So we shield this room from magnetic fields, hyperdark chamber, and these detectors are placed strategically again over the the the head, right up up against the head, and Yeah. We record signals. We try to set the devices on, and we get the participants to engage in a task. And we're looking at the photon emissions over about an hour period.
Okay. So it's literally a photon detector in a very, very, very dark room that's also sort of insulated against electromagnetic stuff, generally speaking. It's in a Faraday cage. It's a room within a room. It's totally dark.
Before we even, like, just talk about the technology and the science here, what's it like going into that room? Have you sat in there for any length of time? I have. I've, we spent a lot of time in the building that room and validating that room because there's things like heat that gets picked up in there that we've had to make sure that it's not getting picked up by our sensors. It's actually quite common.
It's very meditative. It, it kind of gives us the sense of how much light that we're really exposed to on a regular basis that when you go into something that's super hyper dark, you're very aware that it's very dark. Yeah. Yeah. It's much darker than even it's much darker than even, what we normally think of as a lightless room.
Oh, absolutely. The dark curtains that you could probably use in your bedroom is not dark enough. So there's still light everywhere being generated. Yeah. Yeah.
What, can you give give me a sense for, like, how how dark is it in there? Is it truly, like, zero external light bouncing around? I mean, we have quantitative measures. Our background, values are around one to two photons, per second. We can tell when the light gets turned on in another floor, right above us.
Wow. We get about a thousand photons per second. So kind of gives you a very maybe an analogy of how dark it is in this room. Yeah. Again, you know, maybe a simple question because I'm not a physicist.
So someone turns on a light in another room and you get, like, a thousand photons in your dark room within a room. How does that light get in there? Light can can travel through things. It's Yeah. There are very few materials that is impermissive to light.
There's vents. There are, you know, you know, buildings that are not so light tight. Like, that that light bounces around and literally goes through. Photons will find a way. Wow.
Wow. Interesting. Okay. So so so you are literally detecting so you you put people into this super dark room that you've specifically engineered to have all of these special features. It's very well insulated against light, but it's not perfect.
But you can put a photo detector of some kind against someone's skull and you're emitting photons that come from their brain through the skull and out. So that's what we're measuring. That was the the original hypothesis. And this is built off of, almost a decade's worth of work of people who've shown in culture that if you alter neural activity, let's say, with adding glutamate or any other neurotransmitters, you are getting different signals coming out of neurons in a dish. There are you scaled up.
You there are studies that have shown that if you put, light detectors in a cranial window of mice and rodents, that there are photons again coming out. So, in all of those studies, it was brains or brain cells, but we wanted to scale this up to a whole human with just light coming out of their skull. And and from what we see and what we have shown, we can. Mhmm. So okay.
So you can develop this type of technology. Whether or not these biophotons have any biological function, whether in, whether or not they evolve to, as, as, as a signaling, a way to do signaling inside of brain tissue. Even if they're totally passive, they still will have a systematic relationship to metabolism and to neural activity. And so no matter what, we should be able to develop these types of technologies to use light detection as a means to ascertain something about what brain tissue is doing. But on the question, the unknown question of whether these biophotons are really serving specific functions, what are the major hypotheses there?
What are your intuitions and sort of what, experimentally, where are you guys looking in terms of where you think it's most likely that we will find such a function for these biophotons if it does exist? Doctor. Elsner (twenty-three twenty three): Excellent question. And this kind of helps us think about really the role of light in biology, in human biology. The first question is what's coming out?
How much is coming out and can we detect it? That was the very first question that we got and and that we came up with in and in the paper and what and what others have shown is that compared to background, which is what we call, you know, thermal radiation, the amount of light coming out of the brain, and out of the skull seems to be space dependent. So we know that if you look at the the skull of bone anatomy, the the part of our skull that's against our temporal area is much thinner than our frontal or occipital. So the amount of photons that we get should scale with that, and it does. Yeah.
So just from the skull anatomy itself, we're starting to see that it's not just random. It seems to be specific to that. And then there are other questions and other, hypothesis that come up. What if it's just coming from our skin? What if it's coming from the vasculature on our scalp and not actually from our brain?
That's been that was always in the back of our minds. And depending on the task that you do, this the rate the reaction rates and the timing differences doesn't match what vasculature would chain would would show us. So the hypothesis there then, it must be coming from electrical activity. Now we are trying to kinda get to this, question about melanation. You know?
Different pigments absorb different wavelengths of light. Do we see that also in our study? We've had various kinds of participants with hair, no hair, colored hair, different types of hair. And we do see, a melanation dependent response. So, again, it's it's sort of like building on the story, but every time we try to answer one, ten more come up, and I guess that's the the joy of science.
But the next hypothesis that we're trying to test is the propagation. Is the light coming out just random? Is it we what our first paper showed that it's not random, but how is it getting there? If it is generated from neurons, how is it getting from the neuron to our detector? And what's being lost?
And those are what we call the nerve guide experiments, which we talked about at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So you're you're you're sort of narrowing in on, what could become something very interesting here. So you said you've determined or you've ruled out that the light coming out is totally random, that it's just sort of emitted as a byproduct of something.
I guess there's assumptions here. Like if it's totally random, it's gonna scatter in a particular way through the tissue, etcetera, etcetera. How how did you exactly rule out that it's that it's non random in terms of how it's being admitted? And and yeah. How do you think about that?
We can't completely rule out that it's fully, I guess let's let's stepping back a little bit. The randomness aspect came from our or teasing out whether it's random or not came up from our experimental design. So I kinda wanna kinda explain that a little bit a little bit more. So doing a lot of these kind of experiments, we had to be very specific on our task. We can't do anything visual because you can't see anything in those spaces, so we picked a very auditory task.
So where the in the EEG or the electrical landscape, you should see changes within the frequency bands associated with auditory processing within the temporal lobe. So we picked a task that was very quick and we should see changes. And we validated this, and that's why we did simultaneous experiments with EEG and the light emission. Because originally, my hypothesis was that it would track. When we see spikes in electrical activity, we should see spikes in photonic activity because if we're saying they're electrically related.
And that was an that was an assumption that was proven false that they don't track one to one. And so that result tells us that there might be some sort of scattering happening. So and there might be some sort of loss of photons that is happening. Because if it was truly one to one, every time we got an electrical spike or increase in frequency in those spaces, we should get more photons, which we don't. Mhmm.
So basically, you're saying if biology has evolved such that light is being actively moved around in certain patterns and it's being used for something functional, we would expect it to scatter through the tissue in a different pattern compared to if it was just sort of emitted and it was all just sort of a passive thing. And you're seeing hints that that is the case. That exactly that that that's exactly what's happening. And the current experiments right now, which I can kind of allude to is we're using wavelengths of light. So if it was truly random, we should not get wavelength specificity in what is coming out.
But in fact, we are. We're getting very specific wavelengths that are tuned to the emission in terms of the tasks that the individuals are engaged in. So, that is also another indication that these are not random. They're tied to some form of activity. And the the other question that we're trying to also answer is where are they coming from?
Are they deep brain photons that are bouncing around and making their way out? Are they cortical? These are again, we'll need some more software to kind of help source localize where those photons are coming from. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, I mean, when I started to read about your work in this general area, it made me think of, a different period in scientific history, which is very famous, at least for certain types of scientists. So when you go back to what people would often call the early, early days or the pre day, the days that preempted the molecular revolution and discovery of the genetic code and stuff. You actually had this period of time where a lot of physicists started getting into biology for the first time. And that essentially is what gave birth to molecular biology.
It was, it was basically physicists coming into biology. And there's a very famous book from that era. I think it's a book or an essay by Schrodinger, who's famous for being a quantum physicist. He's basically a math guy. And he had, an essay or a book called What is Life?
And he he thought about the question of what biology is from a physics perspective, as opposed to just a biologist perspective. Can you talk a little bit about some of the concepts he he brought in there and how you start to think about this question of what what what is a living organism in a physics sense as opposed to just a biochemistry sense? Wow. What a profound question. I'll I'll attempt to answer it.
What Schrodinger discusses in in what is life, and I think what the movement that is happening right now is looking at first principles. First principles that define physics, the formation of energy, the transformation of energy, and the utilization of energy in a structured format. And so what I'm really trying to engage in, and I think what he tried to express in in that essay was that energy needs to get transformed and structured in a meaningful way. And that meaning draws from material properties of what that biology is. Mhmm.
So we're all gonna be, you know, microtubules or, plasma membrane or cell membrane lipid dynamics. So there's aspects of constraint of fundamental principles, energy driven, that's gonna determine what biology can do. So there's one dimension of constraint and structure, but then the other aspect of life's information. How do we understand how information gets transduced and processed? And you mentioned the molecular revolution that happened.
And what we think of, information right now is chemistry, is genes, molecules, proteins, which is one dimension, but we are completely missing the physical. How does the physical landscape process information in terms of these biological constraints? So kind of tying in what, Schrodinger had mentioned in terms of information and energy, I think that's, I mean, that is what I'm trying to solve right now in the work that we're doing. Mhmm. So one of the things that you said on on your social media that that ties into this stuff is you said the biological structures behave as metamaterials constraining electromagnetic, mechanical, and quantum fields, shaping how energy propagates, resonates, organizes everything from molecules to mind.
So basically, what we're talking about here is if, you know, when we when we point a telescope out into the middle of the universe, energy is relatively unconstrained. Things are just moving around as they do according to physical principles, but life in some sense seems to be a a a structure of matter that changes or patterns the way that energy flows in a very, very different way. So what exactly were you talking about there? What is a metamaterial and and how do these things tie together? Great.
A question that I really wanna dig into. So a metamaterial is materials in which, pattern information they have intrinsic properties of that matter itself that's going to guide how it forms and how it interacts with the environment. For example, refractive indexes for light. The brain itself can be viewed as a as a metamaterial, like the the fats, the proteins that are within it. Any magnetic stimuli, for example, in transcranial magnetic stimulation, the fact that the brain is a metamaterial will allow for applied information to get altered in some way.
We also see this in terms of permissivity, patterning of how certain materials get, structured together. So it's just intrinsic patterning of that material because of the way that the atoms are organized that will give rise to how it interacts with the environment. Okay. Interesting. And so so so there's something here that has to do with how biological systems pattern energy flow through themselves.
Mhmm. Absolutely. So, like, if you take, let's take the myelin. The myelin, why is it like a jelly roll? Why is it not just a big sausage of fat that's across the the axon?
Yeah. The that aspect, the fact that it's a roll, produces a dielectric current, physically. And is that involved in the patterning of how electrical impulses pass through the axon to be determined? But there's something unique of the fact that the myelin sheath produces this property that we need to understand how it is involved with neural communication. Well, so another question I wanna ask you that's it's sort of a big question and it's vague, but but that's at least half on purpose.
So I wanna ask you the question, what is energy? And before I I let you take the reins here, you know, this question has, you know, sort of different angles you can take on it. Well, in one sense, you know, Einstein's equations tell us energy is mass times speed of light squared. So stuff, physical stuff has a mass, and it's bound up with this really big number, the speed of light, and and energy is is that. From a biochemist's perspective, when we think about energetic processes in life and life, you know, ATP and mitochondria and, you know, the energy currency of life, Energy is sort of about the stability and instability of chemical bonds and how those things are moved around.
You're a biophysicist, but you're in also the realm of metabolism and biochemistry. How do you think about this question of what exactly is energy as it relates to biology? I'm smiling because I've had this exact debate very recently. And from a physics point of view, we understand what that equation means. But if we try to really understand what is energy across scales from physics to biology, it's really the potential for change.
It's potential for some kind of movement. If we take a water molecule between the hydrogen within the between the oxygen, that bond is the potential energy. Only when it breaks, when you have that change, do you get the formation of that energy will be used for something else. So that bond is the potential for energy. So what I think of what energy is, it's potential.
It's the ability or the ability to have some sort of change in a in a system, and we call that kinetic, chemical, electrical potential, whatever. But fundamentally, it's the potential that we have for change in any unit that we look at. And so okay. So it's the potential for change. That's pretty intuitive.
You know, the chemical bonds correspond to that potential in the context of the biochemistry of life. And, you know, this is we start to reach the limits of my knowledge here because I'm not a physical chemist, and and I only vaguely remember things about molecular orbital theory. But those bonds in some sense are the way that electrons are orbiting around the atoms and how stable they are. Yeah. I mean, we then we kinda go down to the quantum realm, and subatomic realm.
The prob then we think about probabilistic nature of where electrons are going to be within their valence shells, but it's still the potential for those electrons to interact with another set of valence shells within another electron. So the definition of potential for staying change still holds true. It's the, the intrinsic ability for one unit or system to be able to interact with another system. And there's going to be some sort of constraints that allow for that transfer of change. Doctor.
And so when we think about chemical bonds breaking and forming, you know, whether it's in the context of ATP synthesis or energy use in a mitochondria, or, you know, any other, any other aspect of biology, Bonds get formed, they get broken. That's tied to this this concept of energy and and the potential to do work and move things around. And those bonds are very much, they are the electrons doing different things. And I think this is also where we start to talk about, like, the basic biophysics of of the light production. Right?
Because isn't the light produced based on what the electrons are doing in terms of going back to their ground state and moving around and things like that? Exactly. So that kind of, brings me to this new way of thinking of how physics really interacts with biology. You know, going through the molecular education system, as I call it, we are always thought that there's a receptor ligand and, you know, you have some sort of resonance vibrational and that produces a signal transduction. And kind of moving into the physical domain, we are always thought of looking for what's the receptor that's gonna interact with light.
What's the receptor that's gonna interact with magnetism. And I think we've been thinking about this wrong. I don't think we should be looking at receptor physics interactions. I think we should be looking at the energetic landscapes of and how those thresholds change. So if we think that a cell or even a a protein has an energetic shell and we apply more energy to it, are we then rate increasing or decreasing that energetic capability?
And then does that get transduced? So if we kind of, again, reframe our understanding of what energy is, potential for change, and I add more energy in the form of light, am I increasing that potential for change? And we can call that bonds breaking. And does that then release an ROS or not? So I I think there's needs to be a little bit of shift in how we think, what energy is, and how energy interacts with applied energy.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's there's so much sort of, subtle and implied and and potentially disturbing richness in some of the things that you're saying or what's implied by the things that you're saying because I'm going totally off the cuff here, but when we think about the extent to which electromagnetic energy, whether it's light or in some other form, affects biology, to the extent that some of the things you're articulating or some of the things that are sort of implied by what you're articulating are true, This would start to bring us to things like, okay, well, all of the experimental conditions under which virtually all of biology has already been done has been in a restricted and unnatural electromagnetic environment. And so what is that gonna mean if that is affecting the types of results systematically across all experiments that we see in biology up till now? I mean, there's some really cool experiments that have been done, or observations that have been made, for example, in stem cell research.
They've shown that, individuals who take their plates from the incubator and they put them on their desk and they put them on these carts that move, that the vibration itself can induce the differentiation in a certain format. And as molecular biologists, we try really hard to reduce variance and reduce variability between our conditions and try to keep them, you know, homogeneous. But, you know, for example, the fact that mechanical vibration can change stem cell fate, we also see that applied electromagnetic stimulation can change stem cell fate, says that sensitive biological states are responsive to physical signals. And and another interesting observation that was recently published is that within an incubator that every molecular biologist pretty much uses, there's gradients of electromagnetic fields within the incubator. And so the heterogeneity that you might get between labs or even between people doing them on different shelves Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe induced this variability that we didn't know where it was coming from, but but it actually could be coming from the physical dimension that is transduced to the, to the molecular. Yeah. But the, again, the more we understand of how that happens will kind of give us that complete picture. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically what you just said is, yeah, a lot of the stuff that we think of as noise and random experimental variability and the results we see, it's it's not, I I guess, true I mean, it is noise, but, like, it's actually coming from somewhere that's potentially, a very has a very simple explanation that we just didn't consider. The Petri dish in the back of the incubator might behave a little different than the one in the front because it's actually exposed to a different electromagnetic environment. Correct.
And and I kinda wanna go back. What is noise? Like, what is noise and what is information? Like, what are why are we defining it? What is So I think there's still, like, a a semantic gap here of what is noise and what is information.
But, again, I think that's something that needs to get worked out. Yeah. I think it would, I'm pretty sure it was my PhD mentor. Actually, we you know, I did systems neuroscience, and there's this this concept of spontaneous as a, as opposed to evoked activity and neurons. And we kind of think of the spontaneous activity as being noise or at least partly noise.
But I think he said something like, well, spontaneous activity is just activity we don't understand yet. We don't understand what's evoking. Yeah. So noise is just a bucket that we don't really get, and information is maybe something that we understand and patterned. Yeah.
Yeah. So how I mean, given what you study and the things we've talked about already, how are you like, I'm gonna try and tie this back to things that ordinary people think about and and sometimes get freaked out about. Are you like, what are you concerned at all about five g and cell phones and all of the signals that we assume or hope are relatively innocuous that our technology depends on? Is there more to that than meets the eye maybe? I'm not worried.
And I understand why people are worried because, you know, it's it's scary thing that we don't understand. And when we don't understand something that typically produces an anxious state. Mhmm. I'm not worried because as someone who's trying to understand the physical dimensions of interacting with biology, the I in my view, the biggest key to all of this is information patterning. If I, blast, you know, if we take the the chemical domain, if I just dump a huge high concentration of anything into a system, even the most innocuous thing, like, let's say coffee, it's gonna kill us.
It's gonna kill the system. High enough concentration of anything will damage biology. Mhmm. And that's kind of where the electromagnetic scare comes in. When you put high enough intensity of anything, it'll damage the biology.
With, magnetic fields, what we though there's a lot of heterogeneity in the literature that's being produced in this space, pattern is the most important. You'll see that, you know, at the right frequency, at the right intensity, the right makeup of those variables, then can you interact with biology. And that's really something that I'm trying to validate using conventional molecular tools to show that the information within these physical signals of whatever parameters, it's what ties to unlocking the biology. Mhmm. So I'm not too worried about it.
There might be some, you know, hazardous effects that we may not know about, but that's only gonna come about until we test them. Yeah. Yeah. So as you've mentioned multiple times, we're sort of at the frontier of this world of biophotons and what they're doing. We've just started recently, people like you, to be able to measure these things in order to study them and pursue some of these questions.
But you've mentioned that you see a lot of these biophotons when, a lot of metabolic activity is happening. You see them, you know, at the mitochondria. And you mentioned briefly, I think at the beginning, you know, when tissues are damaged and they regrow, you know, obviously, there's a lot of metabolic activity that happens at those locations at those times. And this brings us to, the field of regeneration. I believe you're doing work in this field.
What what are you guys working on today? And, give give us a concept of what what what are the major model systems in re regeneration that are famous, like some of the salamanders and stuff like that? Sure. Yeah. So salamanders are are well known with regeneration axolotls.
They're very cute, but they also have this really cool ability to regenerate, parts of their body. But they have innate stem cells, to allow for them to repopulate what they lose. Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. We don't have a huge population of stem cells. So in tissue engineering, what we're trying to do is use latent developmental pathways that were once regenerative.
Like, when we're in embryonic state, we're pretty regenerative and to kind of kick start those mechanisms. So in my postdoc, I worked with Michael Levin and David Kaplan, and we developed, a silk hydrogel delivery system to kick start latent developmental pathways by delivering multiple compounds, which was like a novel discovery. So we developed we delivered five different compounds to help kick start some signaling with side inside of those tissues to repattern them into, a fully functional leg. So that's where our model system was was in limb amputations in, Xenopus frogs that are not regenerative in adult, in adult states. I see.
And there was a reason why we picked frogs. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no.
I was just gonna say, okay. So there's organisms like salamanders and other things. You can cut off their arm and their arm will regrow because they've got these, stem cells that they retain even in adulthood. There's other relatively closely related organisms like these frogs that I think you're talking about, other amphibians. They don't have that regenerative capacity, but you are able to induce a regenerative capacity in those creatures, even though they don't normally have it.
Correct. Correct. And, I also want the caveat in being that when they are young in their tadpole phases, they are able to be regenerative. Mhmm. But as they go through their developmental period metamorphosis, they lose that ability.
Yep. And there was a reason we picked this model system because much like us, when we are in utero and in embryonic stages, we have pretty regenerative capabilities. But when we're born and when we get older, we lose them. Specifically, for example, in digit tips, if, up until the age of four, if a a child loses the tip of their fingers, they're regenerative. You they can able to kinda grow that back.
But if we were to cut it off right now, nothing we'd have damaged tissue. So it was a good model system to try to understand how do we kick start developmental pathways. Mhmm. And so it sounds like across animals, there's greater regenerative capacity as you go earlier in development because, I mean, that's what the early embryo is. It it's generating the whole what will become the organism.
As development proceeds, the organism tends to lose regenerative potential. But in some creatures, for some reasons, they retain quite a bit of regenerative potential even into adulthood. And in other ones, there's very little. But even in human beings, you know, up till about the age of four, we have some regenerative capacity in our fingertips. And so the work you did in frogs, it's it's sort of it ties into this idea that, okay, if regenerative capacity goes down across developmental time, perhaps there are ways we can reawaken it even in the adult animal.
Exactly. Exactly. And brings us some sort of evolutionary questions as well. It's like, why did we lose them? What was the cost?
Was there an energetic metabolic cost to losing them so that we can gain it elsewhere? So these are some interesting questions in regenerative medicine that should be asked and answered. And how did you reawaken this regenerative potential in the Xenopus frog? You said you added a few compounds. Were these small molecules?
Were these transcription factors? What was the biology there? So our main goal was to, and much like with many of my research project, is to not micromanage from bottom up. So not from genetics up, but to from systems down kind of control. So the we had to solve this in two two problems.
One, can we create an environment that will even allow for regeneration? And then two, what are we putting into that system to to kick start those pathways? So the first, dimension of microenvironment is using silk hydrogel. There's a reason why we picked silk hydrogels because on the physics side, we see that if you increase stiffness and you change the stiffness, components, interacting with wound healing, it'll induce fibrosis or scarring. So the mechanical landscape is very important.
And so that's why we use silk hydrogel. So the water is also very important in, wound healing. In terms of the chemical compounds, we've picked five very specific, compounds, hormones and proteins that target very specific, pathways in wound healing that prevent, scar formation and induce like, for example, we had brain derived neuro gross, brain derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, well known compound associated with neuroplasticity, neural growth, growth hormone, for example, that targets the metabolism and bone formation. So there's each of those compounds were were, selected based on their individual capabilities. And using our device that was silk based, we, delivered it to the wound site after a full limb amputation in frogs.
We applied it for only twenty four hours, removed the device, and let the animal take over from there. Mhmm. So it sounds like so so there's a biochemical component to this. You introduce certain factors that are like growth factors that are thought to induce, are known to induce, you know, the building up of tissue. But there's also a purely physical component to this.
The, the actual physical material that you used was important for how the regrowth happened and whether or not you had more or less scarring. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is now becoming a well known domain on the physics side. Is that the mechanosensitivity or mechanotransduction, there's a interplay between the stiffness, the mechanics of things, and how information gets transduced to the chemical landscape.
And there are, for example, piezo channels, mechanoreceptive mechanotransductive ion channels, for example, that we know that are on the skin, but we're now starting to see that they're also within tissues as well, within deep tissues. And then I think earlier you also mentioned that wound healing is affected by light as well. What do we know there? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Again, going back into the photobiomodulation community, near infrared and red light is now well established for anti inflammatory properties and for accelerating wound healing. Red light has also been implicated in angiogenesis, so increasing more vasculature to promote wound healing. So if you have more vasculature, you have more nutrients getting to the site to help heal and and, close the wounds. Again, how is the missing dimension? What is it about putting light into the what I guess if we rephrase, what is it about putting energy into the system that allows biology to interact with it?
Yeah. To Yeah. Change the chemical landscape. Yes. We know that wavelengths of light in in the on the red side can affect these things.
We don't know exactly how it's happening. But at some level, it must probably be, you know, the mitochondria are sensitive to those wavelengths. Obviously, they're involved very intimately in what the cell is doing from a metabolic perspective and an energy use perspective. So probably there's some kind of mitochondrial modulation happening that is influencing how these, like, anabolic processes actually play out. Absolutely.
I mean, even to this point, we know that that cytochrome c oxidase and complex four, these important proteins within the mitochondria have wavelength specificities. They seem to be red leaning. So could make sense that that's why red light, seems to be working for mitochondrial function. But there's a a new perspective that I've been working with, Martin Piccard of Columbia with trying to understand the energetic resistance so that certain systems are at certain thresholds of energy levels. And based on their molecular landscape, perhaps we can alter these resistance levels to incoming energy, inputs, for example, light magnetic fields.
Again, theories that need to be validated, but it kind of helps understand it from a first principles point of view. You ask the question, energy. What is what does that mean? How how is it getting manipulated in these systems? And what does light have to do with it, you know, as a form of energy?
Yeah. So in the context of regeneration and wound healing, which, you know, I suppose these are just, you know, points along a spectrum. Regeneration is just sort of a very impressive form of wound healing, it seems. But, you know, we have some capacity to restore our tissues when we're injured. And and you've told us now that physical aspects of the environment, like light and light, just just the tension and and the rigidity of of the mechanical stuff that our bodies interact with affects how these regenerative or or healing processes happen.
One area that's immediately makes me think about is, wow, every time we get a cut or a broken bone or a scrape, you know, we're covering it with Band Aids and casts and things that have certain mechanical properties, things that have certain light blocking properties. What do you think about when when it comes to the sort of the traditional things that we use in modern society to cover up or or try and restore our broken bodies? Is is there something here that might be, that might tie in is there something we might be upsetting by, say, blocking light from getting to a a broken bone or to a cut cut or something like that? That's a good question. I'm not sure we're kind of inhibiting anything.
I think evolutionally, we've kind of evolved to kind of be the best versions of these processes as possible. But I think we can make them better, which we are. Post surgical light stimulation is now being utilized, especially within the red spectrum to accelerate wound healing. Even starting to understand that at post surgical stars to keep them hydrated, The fact that water is extremely important. Water loss, inhibits wound healing.
Again, that kinda brings us to this logic. You know? You have an injury. You lose water. We know that water is also able to interact with red wavelengths of light.
So is it the fact that we keep water in our body to help absorb light? So there's these logic gaps that we're starting to try to fill in to see how the physical dimension is had been interacting with the with the molecular. And another important point that I wanna point out since we're talking about wound healing and light, whenever you have an injury, you do have reactive oxygen species that are getting emitted, which is what we are saying is the the source of our light. That reactive oxygen species is crucial to recruiting your immune system to that wound site. Doctor.
Yeah. Doctor. So it's basically a light beacon that's a light emitting beacon that's recruiting these immune cells to help form a scar so you don't bleed out or have an infection. So there there is an intrinsic that we now know is a light communication mechanism in the form of reactive oxygen species to recruit immune cells. So there's already a dimension that we understand.
Now we need to kind of probe further into how and why. Yeah. I'm sorry. So so are you saying it's actually been demonstrated that one of the ways the immune cells get recruited to a site of injury is they are following the light? Perhaps.
Yep. If if we're saying that reactive oxygen species is a source of light, when you have one ROS being emitted, one photon gets emitted or some source, then yes. That is true. And we see this also within in red light stimulation as well. So we probe, red light into a wound site, you get a high recruitment of neutrophils and immune cells into that area.
Okay. I see. So just the presence of of light of the white right wavelength can help you recruit more immune cells to the site of injury. Correct. Correct.
Interesting. So this would imply that if I've got a cutter or a scrape or something and I'm inside all day versus outside, that the light environment could play a role in how quickly or exactly how my wound heals. Wound heals. Correct. Absolutely.
And, and again, this, this is, such a fascinating and multidimensional conversation because there's many different levels to this. Right? You have the, the physical side of, you know, compressing a wound, the mechanic the fact that you hold a wound to accelerate it. You have the fit the optical side with the lights. Then you have the chemical side of actually repairing the the pattern tissue of what happens.
Very exciting. Lots of work that needs to be done to really flesh this out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
To flesh it out. Yeah. I think you do some work in cancer as well, and there's the whole world that could be discussed here. But just give us a basic idea. Are you are you working on cancer at all, and why is someone like a biophysicist who's been talking about all of this stuff that we've discussed so far?
What what is interesting about cancer to you from a biophysical perspective? I am actively working on cancer and, it's, these model systems and these processes, so neuroscience, cancer, regenerative medicine, all of them are a platform for me to try to understand the physics of life. Some of them give me a different direction and dimension of how to interact with it. So, like, neuroscience, I can kind of play on the electrical side. On in regenerative medicine, we could play on the mechanical side.
With cancer, we can play with the photonic side and then the energetic side of of physics. And this is kind of where my PhD grew from, which which where I saw that magnetic fields can alter cancer physiology. And I kind of flipped that question if cancer can be interacted with magnetic fields, what is it emitting? And can we use that as any kind of diagnostic? So, that's a paper that we published to show very specifically that launched this entire biophysics world for me to show that, when you stress cancer cells, when you change their energetic landscape, they have a optical fingerprint.
They have a light fingerprint that we can differentiate between healthy tissues. So we've shown this in cancer cells in dishes. We've done this in mice that we've injected with different kinds of cancers and used it as a platform, used these light signals to say, is there cancer in the animal or not? And what we're hoping to do is in humans, and that's what we're working on right now, is use these optical sensors to see if we can classify whether a patient has cancer or how far the cancer is in terms of its growth, noninvasively from the outside of their body. Wow.
So if I'm hearing you right, what you're basically saying is, okay, obviously, cancer cells are different than noncancer cells. They became different. They have a different type of metabolism. And to the extent that, you know, we said that these biophotons get produced from based on metabolism that's happening, the metabolic the cancer cells are metabolically distinct from the noncancer cells, and therefore, you would expect them to have a different photonic signature that they emit. And what you're saying, I think, is that you could basically detect cancer cells because they have this unique light signature they're emitting, and you can do this in a fairly noninvasive way?
Absolutely. That's exactly what we're doing. It's taken a lot of, data points, obviously, because there's heterogeneity between cancer that we're starting to see. I mean, we're starting to see what's well established now, but, yes, you can tell the difference between what is cancerous and what is not cancerous. What we're having a hard time doing right now is telling the difference between the cancers.
You know, if we're looking at melanoma versus breast versus glioblastoma, what is that optical signature? So this is where we're looking at more of the physical dimension of the light. So the wavelength, the intensity, the frequency patterns, what is different about them? And this is where we're kind of, leveraging AI to help us figure out what those pattern differences are. Mhmm.
Mhmm. And, you know, I think going back quite a long time, people have had ideas about what cancer is and how it arises. Obviously, one of the classic textbook ways people think about this is what people call the somatic mutation theory. You get certain mutations and oncogenes and maybe that causes cancer. I've had other people on the podcast that have a very different view.
People like, Thomas Seifried who say, well, no. This is cancer is mostly a metabolic dysfunction thing and it's not so much a somatic mutation thing. And obviously, when we start thinking about things like light, you know, people always associate UV light as causing mutations that causes cancer. How do you, as a biophysicist, think about what cancer is and how it maybe ties into concepts from the regeneration field? Do you view this as primarily a mutation thing, as as a metabolism thing?
How do you start to wrap your head around it? Absolutely. And I'm actually kinda working on a paper on this to help solidify this idea from an energetics point of view. And I view it as a dysfunction in energy in terms of how the energy is regulated and how the energy is dissipated. And it might be mutations that arise might be become because of shifts in wavelength and the energy metabolism of the cell itself.
We know that from our papers that there's a shift in wavelength from blue to red, and you can kind of fingerprint those. And the more you lean towards the blue, you emit more UV photons. And if those UV photons lead to more mutations, then that accumulation will change the energy dynamics within the cell. And then the cell will need to adapt. So that's where the free energy principle comes in.
The cells will always do the the behavior that it requires the least amount of energy for the system. So there's a different multilayer dimension here is that I believe that it's fundamentally energetics. When there is changes in energetics, the physics match that to produce a behavioral response that the cell can adapt to, and which is what we see as highly proliferative and highly plastic. And you brought an excellent point there about plasticity, about stem cells and cancer. Why both of them are highly proliferative, one is very plastic, but the other one is also plastic, but very mispatterned.
Where's that information loss Yeah. That allows something to become patterned versus not? And I think that's really what I wanna get into is information. They're both energetics. They're both functioning at, you know, physical and chemical landscape, but where's the mispatterning happening?
Mhmm. Say a little bit more about so what did you say around cancer cells, you know, being more or less red versus blue shifted? What exactly did you mean there? So the photon emissions that are being emitted Yeah. From cancer cells are more blue shifted than their healthy counterparts.
So we've seen this within melanocytes and melanoma, is where we've spent most of our our our time on. The melanoma cells and the tumors that are forming within rodents were more blue shifted than they were red shifted than their melanocyte counterparts. Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay.
So if I'm putting some of those ideas together, some kind of energetic disturbance happens and a cancer cell forms some way, somehow, and it's now energetically different than it was before it became a cancer cell. There's this free energy principle that I think you were pointing to. And, basically, what you're saying is cells are generally gonna try and be energetically efficient and, use no more energy than they they probably want to or need to. And so maybe in some sense, a cancer cell is one in which, the cell is adapting to an energetic shift to obey this free energy principle, but it's disturbed in a way that makes, the cells adaptation at its own level, counter to the organisms. Yes.
Okay. Exactly. So the decisions that it makes it the anthropomorphizing end is independent of the collective of where it came from. And so that disconnect is where where we get, I think, tumors. But, ultimately, it's rising from this change in energetic states, whether that be because of photonic inputs or dysregulation in photonic inputs.
For example, we know that flavins and borphyrins, which are molecules that absorb red light, are altered within cancer. So is that the cause? Is that the result? Those are the gaps that we need to fill. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of lots of question marks, lots of exciting questions to pursue here. But, you know, yeah, obviously, the the role of light in biology extends way beyond image formation and way beyond even just circadian regulation.
This stuff is fascinating. Do you think how much has this caused you to think about the modern light environment? So, you know, just from first principles and you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, clearly, our light environment that we're inside of today, is very, very different from the one our ancestors and pretty much all organisms evolved in. And so the extent to which a lot of the stuff we've talked about is true to any degree would imply that the change in the light environment itself is probably having potentially sizable effects on our health and our our biology and how it's all working together. At a high level, you know, how do you think about what the modern light environment is doing to people?
I think about this all the time. I think of us all the time because I think about even just about one hundred and fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, our our parents and grandparents in terms of being around natural light, candlelight, the intensity, the warmness of glow. I mean, you can go down to your your neighborhood, a construction source, and a store, and you can find cool light versus warm light. So we have this this population of people who are in different colors of light, intensities of light. I think about this all the time because I wonder what it does to behavior.
If we scale it up from molecular all the way up to behavior, I wonder what it does. And I don't have an answer in terms of what it could do, what it means for us, but this is a really cool thing to think about and to investigate perhaps, in the future. Mhmm. Mhmm. So we've heard a lot of ground, and you sort of you know, you've you've got a unifying thing that you're interested in here.
But as you mentioned, you you touch a lot of different aspects of biology that tie into this from the neuroscience to the regeneration to the cancer and so forth. What are some of the things, you know, very quick in the last few minutes here, that your lab is working on or that other labs in this general realm are working on, areas where you think we're gonna make progress and start to learn some interesting new stuff about the biophysics of life in the next, say, three or four or five years? Oh, I love it. I love their ending on this. I think the biggest movement that we're gonna make is stepping outside of the biomolecular domain and accepting that there are other concepts that might drive and pull the genetics and the the molecular.
The other aspect is the energetics domain is, in my view, one unifying fundamental theme. It's a fundamental in physics. It must be a fundamental in other domains that drive biology. So, you know, the the biophysical community has been kind of also segmented, so and independent of biology, in in a lot of cases, mainly because of the tools, and we kind of mentioned this a little bit. So the next three to five years, I see a big movement.
And thanks to biomedical engineering, when people are actually seeing that stiffness and conductivity and photonic aspects of the materials guide biology. And I think that will help us deepen our understanding of if we understand that these physical landscapes alter the biology, then these physical stimuli are also in our environment. Must be shaping biology as well. Yeah. So it sounds like it sounds like you probably think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the the raw physical composition of our environment from the physical material that touches us to the light and electromagnetic, electromagnetic environments we're embedded in.
This is probably having a systematic and perhaps underappreciated role, function in terms of how life unfolds at the behavioral level, at the developmental level, at the regeneration and disease level, then maybe biology has appreciated until recently. Doctor. El Farouk (3five 30Three): Yep. That's exactly it. And if we're thinking, you know, twenty, thirty, forty years in the future when we're thinking about spaceflight and we're you know, there's a a domain of individuals who are looking at, you know, colonizing other planets and and things like this, we really need to understand this physical landscape for the body and the structure that we have evolved in in our current physical space if you are thinking about extending beyond it.
Wow. Well, fascinating stuff. I'm definitely gonna sort of of book bookmark you and and watch what this field is coming up with in the next few years. Any final thoughts you wanna leave people with that have to do with your your work or anything that we discussed today? I think I'm I'm clearly passionate about trying to understand the physical dimensions of life.
I think as people, as we move forward in this space and as we gain momentum, I think thinking big picture and thinking also first principles of that guide life would be something that I would kind of wanna put out there and for people to appreciate. Alright. Well, thank you very much for your time. Fascinating stuff. And I I look forward to talking to you again, in a couple years.
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