Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden (PDF)

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New York Times bestseller • Life on the Edge alters our understanding of our world’s fundamental dynamics through the use of quantum mechanics.Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Using first-hand experience at the cutting edge of science, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal that missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics. Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around the world, each chapter in Life on the Edge illustrates one of life’s puzzles: How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes copy themselves with such precision? Life on the Edge accessibly reveals how quantum mechanics can answer these probing questions of the universe.Guiding the reader through the rapidly unfolding discoveries of the last few years, Al-Khalili and McFadden describe the explosive new field of quantum biology and its potentially revolutionary applications, while offering insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life? As they brilliantly demonstrate in these groundbreaking pages, life exists on the quantum edge.Winner, Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Remarkable…Life on the Edge is a fascinating and thought-provoking book that combines solid science, reasonable extrapolation from the known into the unknown, and plausible speculation to give an accessible overview of a revolutionary transformation in our understanding of the living world.” —Wall Street Journal”The elemental provocation of the book lies in the authors’ ability to make the complex conceivable… McFadden and Al-Khalili give sure footing to the anything-goes bafflement of quantum theory.” —Kirkus Reviews”McFadden and Al-Khalili draw readers into a revolutionary new paradigm. . . An intellectually exhilarating visit to the baffling frontiers of science!” —Booklist [starred]”The book elegantly opens up a new way of looking at nature.” —The Independent; “Books of the Year” “A really original science book about a new field of research … Groundbreaking.” —Financial Times,“Books of the Year” “Coherence is just one of the complex phenomena that Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden set out to teach the reader. They succeed by using delightfully revealing analogies and similes, some borrowed from their prior work, that make slippery concepts sit still for study.” —The Economist “Hugely ambitious … the skill of the writing provides the uplift to keep us aloft as we fly through the strange and spectacular terra incognita of genuinely new science.” —The Times (UK) “Physicist Jim Al-Khalili and molecular biologist Johnjoe McFadden explore this extraordinary realm with cogency and wit.” —Nature Magazine “This thrilling book is an overview of a field that barely exists … Al-Khalili has a genius for illustrating complex ideas via imaginative sidetracks.” —The Sunday Telegraph “The great virtue of this book is its thesis – it sets out a clear and enthusiastic argument for the importance of quantum biology.” —New Scientist “Life on the Edge gives the clearest account I’ve ever read of the possible ways in which the very small events of the quantum world can affect the world of middle-sized living creatures like us. With great vividness and clarity it shows how our world is tinged, even saturated, with the weirdness of the quantum.” —Philip Pullman “This illuminating account of an important new field is a wonderfully educative read.” —A C Grayling About the Author Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey and is the editor of several leading text books. For over a decade, he has specialized in examining tuberculosis and meningitis, inventing the first successful molecular test for the latter. He is the author of Quantum Evolution and co-editor of Human Nature: Fact and Fiction.Jim Al-Khalili OBE is an academic, author, and broadcaster. He is a leading theoretical physicist based at the University of Surrey, where he teaches and carries out research in quantum mechanics. He has written a number of popular science books, including Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science. He has presented several television and radio documentaries, including the BAFTA-nominated Chemistry: A Volatile History and The Secret Life of Chaos. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1IntroductionThe winter frost has arrived early this year in Europe and there is a penetrating chill in the evening air. Buried deep within a young robin’s mind, a once vague sense of purpose and resolve grows stronger.The bird has spent the past few weeks devouring far more than her normal intake of insects, spiders, worms and berries and is now almost double the weight that she was when her brood flew the nest back in August. This extra bulk is mostly fat reserves, which she will require as fuel for the arduous journey upon which she is about to embark.This will be her first migration away from the spruce forest in central Sweden where she has lived for the duration of her short life and where she reared her young chicks just a few months ago. Luckily for her, the previous winter was not too harsh, for a year ago she was not yet fully grown and therefore not strong enough to undertake such a long journey. But now, with her parental responsibilities discharged until next spring, she has only herself to think about, and she is ready to escape the coming winter by heading south to seek a warmer climate.It is a couple of hours after sunset. Rather than settle for the night, she hops in the gathering gloom to the tip of a branch near the base of the huge tree that she has made her home since the spring. She gives herself a quick shake, much like a marathon runner loosening up her muscles before a race. Her orange breast glistens in the moonlight. The painstaking effort and care she invested in building her nest–just a few feet away, partially hidden against the moss-covered bark of the tree trunk–is now a dim memory.She is not the only bird preparing to depart, for other robins–both male and female–have also decided that this is the right night to begin their long migration south. In the trees all around her she hears loud, shrill singing that drowns out the usual sounds of other nocturnal woodland creatures. It is as though the birds feel compelled to announce their departure, sending out a message to the other forest inhabitants that they should think twice before contemplating invading the birds’ territory and empty nests while they are gone. For these robins most certainly plan to be back in the spring.With a quick tilt of her head this way and that to make sure the coast is clear, she takes off into the evening sky. The nights have been lengthening with winter’s advance and she will have a good ten hours or so of flying ahead of her before she can rest again.She sets off on a course bearing of 195° (15° to the west of due south). Over the coming days she will carry on flying in, more or less, this same direction, covering two hundred miles on a good day. She has no idea what to expect along the journey, nor any sense of how long it will take. The terrain around her spruce wood is a familiar one, but after a few miles she is flying over an alien moonlit landscape of lakes, valleys and towns.Somewhere near the Mediterranean she will arrive at her destination; although she is not heading for any specific location, when she does arrive at a favorable spot she will stop, memorizing the local landmarks so that she can return there in the coming years. If she has the strength, she may even fly all the way across to the North African coast. But this is her first migration, and her only priority now is to escape the biting cold of the approaching Nordic winter.She seems oblivious to the surrounding robins that are all flying in roughly the same direction, some of which will have made the journey many times before. Her night vision is superb, but she is not looking for any landmarks–as we might were we making such a journey–nor is she tracking the pattern of the stars in the clear night sky by consulting her internal celestial map, as many other nocturnal migrating birds do. Instead, she has a rather remarkable skill and several million years of evolution to thank for her capacity to make what will become an annual autumn migration, a trip of some two thousand miles.Migration is, of course, commonplace in the animal kingdom. Every winter, for instance, salmon spawn in the rivers and lakes of northern Europe, leaving young fry that, after hatching, follow the course of their river out to sea and into the North Atlantic, where they grow and mature; three years later, these young salmon return to breed in the same rivers and lakes where they spawned. New World monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles southward across the entire United States in the autumn. They, or their descendants (as they will breed en route), then return north to the same trees in which they pupated in the spring. Green turtles that hatch on the shores of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic swim across thousands of miles of ocean before returning, every three years, to breed on the exact same eggshell-littered beach from which they emerged. The list goes on: many species of birds, whales, caribou, spiny lobsters, frogs, salamanders and even bees are all capable of undertaking journeys that would challenge the greatest human explorers.How animals manage to find their way around the globe has been a mystery for centuries. We now know that they employ a variety of methods: some use solar navigation during the day and celestial navigation at night; some memorize landmarks; others can even smell their way around the planet. But the most mysterious navigational sense of all is the one possessed by the European robin: the ability to detect the direction and strength of the earth’s magnetic field, known as magnetoreception. And while we now know of a number of other creatures that possess this ability, it is the way the European robin (Erithacus rubecula) finds her way across the globe that is of greatest interest to our story.The mechanism that enables our robin to know how far to fly, and in which direction, is encoded in the DNA she inherited from her parents. This ability is a sophisticated and unusual one–a sixth sense that she uses to plot her course. For, like many other birds, and indeed insects and marine creatures, she has the ability to sense the earth’s weak magnetic field and to draw directional information from it by way of an inbuilt navigational sense, which in her case requires a novel type of chemical compass.Magnetoreception is an enigma. The problem is that the earth’s magnetic field is very weak–between 30 and 70 microtesla at the surface: sufficient to deflect a finely balanced and almost frictionless compass needle, but only about a hundredth the force of a typical fridge magnet. This presents a puzzle: for the earth’s magnetic field to be detected by an animal it must somehow influence a chemical reaction somewhere in the animal’s body–this is, after all, how all living creatures, ourselves included, sense any external signal. But the amount of energy supplied by the interaction of the earth’s magnetic field with the molecules within living cells is less than a billionth of the energy needed to break or make a chemical bond. How, then, can that magnetic field be perceptible to the robin?Mysteries, however small, are fascinating because there’s always the possibility that their solution may lead to a fundamental shift in our understanding of the world. Copernicus’s ponderings in the sixteenth century on a relatively minor problem concerning the geometry of the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system, for instance, led him to shift the center of gravity of the entire universe away from humankind. Darwin’s obsession with the geographical distribution of animal species and the mystery of why isolated island species of finches and mockingbirds tend to be so specialized led him to propose his theory of evolution. And German physicist Max Planck’s solution to the mystery of blackbody radiation, concerning the way warm objects emit heat, led him to suggest that energy came in discrete lumps called “quanta,” leading to the birth of quantum theory in the year 1900. So, could the solution to the mystery of how birds find their way around the globe lead to a revolution in biology? The answer, bizarre as it may seem, is: yes.But mysteries such as this are also a haunt of pseudoscientists and mystics; as the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins stated in 1976, “the study of magnetic field effects on chemical reactions has long been a romping ground for charlatans.”1 Indeed, all manner of exotic explanations, from telepathy and ancient ley lines (invisible pathways connecting various archaeological or geographical sites that are supposedly endowed with spiritual energy) to the concept of “morphic resonance” invented by the controversial parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, have at some point been proposed as mechanisms used by migratory birds to guide them along their routes. Atkins’s reservations in the 1970s were thus understandable, reflecting a skepticism prevalent among most scientists working at that time toward any suggestion that animals might be able to sense the earth’s magnetic field. There just did not seem to be any molecular mechanism that would allow an animal to do so–at least, none within the realms of conventional biochemistry. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I first learned about quantum mechanics during my undergraduate schooling, some 60 years ago. Much time has passed since and what has been learned by researchers in the fields of molecular biology and quantum physics do not disappoint. The ideas presented by the authors are not fully accepted yet but are becoming more believable with passing time and fundamental research. The complexity of biological systems is staggering for sure and hard to understand with our classical minds. But applying quantum mechanics may just be the key to understanding the spark of life. I highly recommend this book to anyone with interest in learning more about the miracle of life.

⭐Ideas are interesting and scientific references give them weight incredibity. Quantum physics is literally made of magic. What I find spooky is the understanding that we think we can dig into mother nature’s plan an edit genes. I think the state of the world has clearly shown us that we can’t outsmart Mother Nature with our technology and it’s time for us to work with her under her systems. You truly can’t fix or repair something until you understand how it works know why I broke down in the first place. I think we have a long way to go. I greatly appreciated this frame of reference it open my eyes to a world of scientists who are literally dabbling in gibberish. I think our focus should be a little more reality oriented but I did appreciate his journey into the wacky world of magic!

⭐This is one of the most interesting books that I’ve read. It describes how quantum phenomena such as quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement have been shown to be essential to the workings of enzymes, respiration (the respiratory chains), photo synthesis, olfactory neurons, magneto reception in birds and butterflies (and likely other animals), and it plays a role on the functionality of DNA. The authors also speculate that quantum phenomena may one day be able to explain consciousness and the origin of life.The book gives a good layman’s overview of quantum mechanics, the two slit experiment, coherence and decoherence. How quantum waves collapse just by being “observed” can be a mystery even to beginning physics students (been there). For example, why does an electron stop to act like a wave and become a particle when someone attempt to observe it? Well, the wave collapse doesn’t happen because a conscious being decides to take a look. It’s because the act of measurement introduces other items, atoms and particles, into the system in order to perform the observation, and the introduced noise collapses the wave. This is decoherence. However, the quantum systems in biological systems are surrounded by molecules and thus a lot of noise and it seems they shouldn’t be able to maintain their wave characteristics (coherence), but amazingly they do, and the book explains how. All of this is explained gallantly and it is truly fascinating.I have a few minor complaints. On page 185 they write in regards to quantum entanglement “This bizarre feature of the quantum world seems not to respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit,…”. “Seems” is the keyword. The fact is it doesn’t violate “cosmic speed limit” and they could have added that for clarity and perhaps also explained why that is. They state that “particles can be in two places at the same time”, which is misleading. Quantum mechanics describe the probabilities of finding a particle at specified locations, and these probabilities (arising from quantum waves) are spread out. Well they say that too, but why use the misleading statement? The paragraph on Greenland and the Vikings was misleading since it implied that Greenland was much warmer during the so called “medieval warm period”, and it wasn’t. It was cold when the Vikings got there and it was cold when they left. I should add that the book was written in 2014 and this may not have been well known back then. However, my minor complaints are not enough to take away any stars. It is a great book.They also added a lot of interesting stories about people, animals, and events between all the technical details and explanations, which made the book less dense. The book was very well written and I think it was a lot of fun to read. I highly recommend this book.

⭐Facinating! Difficult chemical to calculations, but the book was sprinkled with stories, which took you from the theoretical to the practical world and helped you understand it.

⭐Life on the Edge is an account of the growing field of quantum biology. The subject is to a certain extent in its academic infancy and no doubt will be an increasing focus for academics in the coming decades. In the book the authors outline certain mechanisms that seem to be a consequence of quantum mechanical phenomenon that various species take advantage of but also discuss broadly how quantum mechanics could intertwine with biology.The authors mix their time with familiarizing the reader with the unintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics and using those analogies to discuss how biology might use them. In the process of reading the book the reader will learn about the wave particle duality of nature as well as coherence and the collapse of the wave function. The authors spend time discussing how the messy and dense environment in the cell is an unintuitive arena for wave functions to propagate as most quantum phenomenon that we know of only retain their wave behavior when they are in isolated environments. At the core of the discussion of the likelihood of quantum biology is a high level perspective on how that might happen and the authors discuss how their might be a quantum resonance at the biological level which enhances wave propagation rather than opposes it. The details of this are much beyond the scope of this book and I am quite sure not worked out in any detail by the authors either as they are fairly radical. The authors discuss the criticisms of quantum biology and the reductionist response that inevitably some aspects of biology will be a function of quantum mechanics as Newtonian mechanics is quantum mechanics in the law of large numbers. Some of their response is convincing and some of it is not. In particular the authors discuss how the magnetic compass in birds that are used for navigation have quantum mechanical origin but then in the full discussion it becomes less and less clear that the mechanism is a fact at all. Other aspects of their discoveries seem quite remarkable; in particular the authors discuss how photosynthesis is catalyzed by a quantum walk by the incoming photon and that the speed by which the catalyst works can only be explained by the photon taking multiple paths. The idea of biology using quantum computation is the most interesting idea in the book and it is used in several places. The authors spend some time on DNA replication and how quantum mechanics might have a roll their in frequency resonance but this is a bit vague as it becomes clear there are many different phenomenon at work. The book effectively is a collection of examples of which all of them are at best partially worked out but in reading the chapters the reader gets a sense of what people are working on and the directions they are taking to attempt to provide solutions to biological mysteries.Life on the Edge gives a new perspective to the interested reader on quantum mechanics in biology. It is a new field that will take time to develop and evolve but in reading the book one gets a sense that there is promise in this research and some of the proposed solutions could offer fascinating solutions to how life allows us to speed up combinatorial dynamics that drive evolution. Very interesting book.

⭐Bought this book new as a gift but the outside is scratched up and damaged.

⭐In 2000, Johnjoe McFadden wrote a book, Quantum Evolution, exploring how quantum mechanics is directly relevant to biology. At the time, the majority of biologists and physicists would have told you that quantum mechanics was largely irrelevant to biology, which is warm and wet and large scale, rather than the very small-scale or very cold conditions most physicists associate with non-classical behaviour.Life on the Edge was coauthored by McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili at the end of 2014. In those 14 years, quantum biology has progressed from wild speculation to mainstream, due in part to the work of these authors, and it is interesting to compare the two books.Compared with Quantum Consciousness, the chapter on Quantum Genetics has been both tightened up and made more tentative. The proposed mechanism for directed mutation, using the inverse Zeno effect, has been clarified and restricted. There is no longer any special appeal to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The authors have rowed back significantly from ideas that quantum mechanics is generally a major driver of mutation, which is a shame as it has the potential to explain some tricky bottlenecks in evolution.Similarly, the chapter on Mind is much more believable. The authors start by discussing Roger Penrose’s ideas, such as the ability of the mind to bypass the Goedel theorem by being a quantum computer. Fortunately they do not undermine their own credibility by taking these ideas too seriously, and in fact their analysis is a very clear critique of Penrose’s. Their proposed role for quantum mechanics in ion channels seems very plausible.I am not very persuaded by the proposed link between consciousness and electromagnetism. A human has a psychological and social need to be able to explain their own decisions, and this explanation is generally in terms of a sequential narrative. There is no necessity for this narrative to match what actually happens in the brain, except in its inputs and outputs. A brain is a black box to its owner almost as much as to others. Electromagnetism is a possible way for the mind to work in a synchronised way, but whether or not this happens is independent of the nature of consciousness. Moreover, it is not clear how this relates to quantum mechanics, except very indirectly. McFadden’s earlier book Quantum Consciousness tries to make the connection, though in a hand-wavy and not very plausible way. I can see why he has dropped this idea, though I think he could have removed all the references to electromagnetic theories of consciousness from this book altogether. They belong in a different book.The chapter on the beginnings of life is greatly clarified compared with similar ideas expressed in Quantum Evolution. The problem with any understanding of the beginnings of life is that there is a period of about 100 million years where somehow, somewhere on the Earth (or just maybe, in space) life began. Presumably this happened because a self-replicating molecule appeared, which mutated and evolved into a modern eukaryotic cell. Trying to identify the original molecule just by looking at modern cells is difficult or even impossible. Replicating the start of the process might take an ocean of water and 100 million years, which makes it a tricky experiment. Until either of these is done, we have no way of knowing what the first self-replicators were or even how complex they had to be. At least, McFadden and Al-Khalili show how the incredible search capabilities of quantum mechanics could help achieve the first step, of constructing the first self-replicating molecule.The overall gist of the book is that life is a consequence of the boundary between quantum mechanics and classical physics, which seems to be key to many of the most important processes in biology, from photosynthesis to respiration and scent. It is hard to disagree with these conclusions. Time for biologists to learn some quantum mechanics.

⭐This book was written by two physicists and it shows. Having said that if I was asked to write a book about, well almost anything really, then I don’t think I would have made a tenth as good a job as these two. Sometimes the concepts are not fully explained – and maybe you would need a library of related information to fully understand the ideas expounded here. And maybe a life of immersion in the maths and “understanding” of the quantum world. But there is enough here for the couch scientist to grasp the underlying reasoning, if not the detail. Bravely the authors in the final chapters offer a speculative insight into The Meaning of Liff from a quantum theorist’s perspective.I think this is an important book and I wish I had the mathematical skill to delve further into this important and fascinating subject.Don’t be put off please. Read this and be amazed at the progress of understanding our theoretical and experimental scientists have made in just the last few years. Thankyou to the authors

⭐Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden reveal in “Life on the Edge” that actions and experiences of living things are rooted in quantum mechanics, and tackle this challenging subject with extraordinary clarity and occasional humour. They offer many fascinating and excellent insights – from the odd fact that the mirror image of a limonene molecule smells not of oranges, but turpentine, to the idea that a plant’s leaf behaves like a quantum computer. And I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the careful and precise detailed explanation that followed each fact.The authors explain that while everything in the universe is made up of electrons, protons and other particles that obey the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics including the probability of particles being in two places at once, the collisions and vibrations that occur at a macroscopic level normally prevent such weird behaviour affecting the whole object. They make clear that “The weird quantum stuff that happens at the level of the very small doesn’t usually make a difference to the big stuff like cars or toasters that we see and use every day.”But life is different. For example, the internal compass that assists female robins’ winter migration relies on the curious ability known as magnetoreception. A chemical in the robin’s eye moves electrons through quantum tunnelling when it absorbs light, resulting in superposition – two places at once, each leading to a different outcome in the reaction that follows. Which outcome is more likely is influenced by the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field, so the robin can detect if it is heading towards the equator or away from it. And it seems humans also harness quantum effects, such as the action of our enzymes in speeding up chemical reactions that would otherwise take thousands of years.The implications of the role of quantum mechanics in living creatures, plants, microbes and bacteria has become a new science – and this book is an excellent primer for this fascinating subject. The authors have shown an outstanding ability to explain this complex subject in wonderful clarity. Right down to the basic principles of quantum mechanics, which I have read again and again in many books – but is so clearly described in Life on the Edge. (No I still don’t understand it – but then nobody does, so that’s OK!)

⭐About a tenth a way through this I found myself thinking that the authors had sold me some snake-oil, and were making a new subject up, just to sell a far-fetched book. But I stuck with it and was quickly absorbed by the idea that there’s an awful lot of quantum stuff going on down in the weeds of the life sciences. But be warned: this book isn’t dumbed down and despite the authors performing miracles of explanation, the concepts aren’t easy – partly, I think, because the detail of biology isn’t as well understood as that of physics. This book demands high concentration and, therefore, fails my Beach Read Test. But I’ll still give it five stars and happily expand my reading about biology.P.S. One or two sentences, unwittingly, explained to me how the Starship Enterprise, boldly going at more than the speed of light, might be able to receive those improbable messages from Star Fleet. And that caused me to think that Captain Kirk might one day be asking his Communications Officer to patch a message through to his stateroom cactus.

⭐Having read plenty of popular science books, i think the key is keeping it pacy while including lots of science explained to thw right level. This does the job superbly with a tough subject. Each chapter takes you through a similar journey from macro to beyond micro and for me at least, leaves you astonished and just about grasping the details right at the end. It’s hard with a maths based subject to explain to us non-mathematicians what is going on, but i didnt feel i had missed out on anything except that which I couldn’t mathematically comprehend anyway. And the bits you need extra maths for were labelled as such, i.e no talking down. Very rich and very exciting

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