What if biology depends on quantum mechanics, not just chemistry?

From birds to cells to human health, the evidence is growing. On this

episode of the Impact Quantum Podcast, Jeff Anders joins us to unpack

quantum biology, daos and a new frontier in science.

All right. Hello and welcome back to the Impact Quantum

Podcast where we explore the emerging industry of quantum computing

and all the associated fields with that, including

maybe even quantum biology. You don't need to be a PhD

or

want to go to get a PhD. You just have to be curious. And with

that is the most quantum curious person I know.

Quantum Gahooly. That's me new nickname, Candace. It's been a

day. We were talking in the virtual green room. One of my kids birthdays is

today. They were recording, recording this and all three of them are homesick from school,

so. And yeah, it's been, it's been,

it's been a day. So who we are speaking to? Us.

We are talking today with Jeff Anders. Okay. And he

is the CEO of Leverage and he

also runs the Quantum biology dao.

I'm really excited about. Co founder of the dow.

Yeah, but we'll, we'll get into that. Yeah, I'm very excited about that.

I think I know what a DAO is

and it's not like a philosophy, although I think it is like the DAO of

whatever. But it is a distributed application

something. It's. Is it similar to like dapps or something like that?

It's similar in that they're both

decentralized, but they, the DApps

decentralized applications. DAOs are decentralized

autonomous organizations. Got it. Now there's

in actual practice, there's a question of how decentralized

are they really and how autonomous are they really.

But the place where daos show up and

are relevant to quantum is that

you have this entire sector developing in

Web3, the blockchain area. So in crypto called

DECI. DECI is short for decentralized science.

There we all know that there have been problems in science.

There have been problems with scientific funding and scientific

institutions. So then there's a question

about why are there problems? What can we do about it?

A bunch of people have come to think that the

problem has to do with centralization. You have a small

number of science funders, you have a small number of

essentially research agendas that are being pursued.

Wouldn't it be better if we could decentralize that? And

then crypto answered the call and you

now have this movement, the decent deci, which is trying

to decentralize science and through that

make science work better. Okay, that makes sense.

And so then daos are part of that. If you look around, there's

DAO is a slightly larger category. There

are a number of different organizations are

or have DAOs, like I think Uniswap does. The original

DAO was just called the DAO and didn't have anything to do with

decentralized science. But inside Desai, there

are a dozen, maybe more DAOs, which

are these decentralized organizations that are trying to

advance science. I gotcha.

I have some questions around that. Great.

The first question is,

does the like. Is it an organization like a corporation, or is

it like. Somebody once described a DAO as something like Reddit, but like across

all these servers. And I suspect neither one of those is really an

adequate description of it. Yeah, I would

say that it's a little bit like

Reddit and a little bit like a corporation.

Daos have their legal

wrapper, which is basically the way that

they are officially incorporated in some quality. The

Quantum Biology dao, for example, is officially represented

by an association in Switzerland.

And then different daos sort of attach themselves to

different legal zones in

different ways. But what the DAO itself is, is

a community of people that governs

itself and makes decisions in some way. So at the

Quantum. So Quantum Biology Dao, we

debuted in October of last year, did an

auction of a token called the Q Bio Token.

This token is tradable. If people want to buy it, they can go to Uniswap

and or Radium if they're on Solana and get the

QBIO token. What the Q Bio token is, is it's a vote.

These are governance tokens. And if you have

a vote, million Cubio or 10,000 Q bio in your

crypto wallet, when the DAO votes on something, you can

plug in your wallet and you can vote using the tokens. It's one

token, one vote. And when we started off,

we auctioned off a whole bunch of these tokens. We raised about

$7 million, which ended up in the treasury of

the Quantum Biology dao. And the thing that people

got through the auction were these tokens. And

so essentially we auctioned off a whole bunch of

rights to vote on how the money in the pot

raised from the auction would be used. This is a. It's a.

I hadn't encountered prior to doing the Quantum Biology dao,

I had not encountered this as a way of raising money, hadn't encountered it as

a way of raising money for science, but we did it.

We raised a bunch of money and now we have a

community of people. I think there's. I'd say there's

probably like 40 or so active contributors

right now. Different people have different numbers of

tokens. We actually, if we want to go into this, we have a sort of

slightly more complicated governance set up. But essentially what's happening is

people are using the tokens to vote and then the organization

does whatever was voted on. So far, the main thing we

did is we gave a grant to an organization, the Quantum

Biology Institute. And then. But we have

all sorts of things. We have an event planned, Quantum

biology in Nigeria. We have an event that

I think is going to happen in. We have a bunch of community members from

Nigeria that's going to happen, I think, in January.

We've talked about putting together curricula for

universities, for especially high school, actually.

And then maybe we'll start a journal. We've got a grant

process that we've been talking about where we can give grants to other things in

the field of quantum biology. But essentially, you could think about

this like this is a miniature version of the nsf. It's

giving out money and help to set up infrastructures.

It's a bit broader of a mandate. And

the whole point is to advance the field of quantum biology. So this is a

new way of raising money for science and a new way of

making decisions about how that money is used.

And I think that's a good segue for the next question.

All right. What is quantum biology? Yeah, it's a

great question. So quantum biology, as one might guess,

is the intersection of quantum physics and

biology. Biology, as we know, studies life.

Quantum physics studies a bunch of

phenomena that were discovered in the early

1900s as the phenomenon of superposition and

entanglement, spin, tunneling,

and the. Basically,

there's this because quantum physics,

like our best theories that describe how particles work,

that is quantum mechanics. So in some sense,

all the objects that we see all depend on quantum mechanics.

It's like how, you know, I've got a pen here. How does the pen work?

Well, the pen is composed of particles or molecules. Those are

locked together in particular ways. And if you really want to understand how it works,

you have to go down to the quantum level. But for practical

purposes, you don't need to understand quantum physics in order to use

a pen. You can, you can just use the pen. That's

fine. The big question is, in order to understand

biology, and this is both on a theoretical level and practically,

we want to make people healthier. Do you need to understand

quantum physics? A bunch of people have thought,

no, we don't need to. Quantum effects disappear before we

end up at the time and length scales that show up in biology. But

a growing number of people have proposed,

as scientists that actually know there are

quantum effects that are important for understanding

biology. So if you're a biologist and don't know how quantum

works, then you're missing something important.

So that's, that's what quantum biology is. I can say, like,

in terms of where the field is. Right after quantum

physics came out, theorists jumped in and were like,

okay, let's apply this to life. They had a bunch of interesting ideas.

It took until the 60s or 70s before we ended

up getting candidates for effects that actually

look like you need to understand quantum in order to

understand the biological effect. Maybe the clearest example is

photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, the best understanding

uses a quantum effect. You have to understand quantum physics in order to

understand how photosynthesis is working at the bottom.

There's then a question of. People have used

quantum physics to help explain how birds detect the Earth's

magnetic field. So there's an overlap between quantum and

magnetobiology, which we should talk about.

But essentially where we are right now is that scientists have

discovered a few interesting places. Enzyme tunneling

is another. There's probably proton tunneling in DNA. There's a bunch of

these examples. And then the big question is,

is it just going to be that? But for quantum in

biology, all you need is to know a couple, like the short

list of examples. You could think of those as

exceptions to the classical rule. Or is

it the case that actually something quantum is doing

something in biology that's bigger than people have thought, and we need

to figure out what that is. That's a good

way to put it. And, you know, there's a number of the, The. The birds

sensing the. The. Or animals in general, sensing that. I also

do wonder, and this could just be because I'm not a biologist, but,

you know, if, If I can get a magnetic compass

to sense the direction of the field, like, yeah, why

can't. Why can't.

There's a lot to unpack. But, but, like, why can't. Why can't there be cells

that would have evolved to pick. Yeah,

I'm sorry, kick off so well on that one in particular,

it's interesting. There are bacteria that scientists

found called magnetotactic bacteria

that actually contain small magnetic crystals.

And the magnetic. Yeah, and you can, you can see them in a microscope and

they line up in a rigid line such

that the Earth's magnetic field actually acts on it like a compass

needle. So if you, if the bacteria

are alive or dead, if you rotate a magnetic field

around them, the bacteria themselves will rotate. And that's

just, it's like they contain a compass needle

that's also. And that. So you need

electromagnetism to understand

that, at least on a physical level, but

you don't need quantum. And so then there's a question of are

there other things that are going on that are

happening? And it's, it's part of. And there's a, there's an

actual scientific puzzle here. I mentioned that there is an

overlap between magnetobiology and,

and quantum physics. Scientists have

been coming across evidence of weak

magnetic fields, like the Earth's magnetic field, and having

effects in biology. And they've been coming across

this for a very long time. But the interesting

thing is that the Earth's magnetic field is sufficiently

weak that it's hard to explain how it

actually affects things. Like if the cell has a little

miniature compass needle made up of magnetite crystals, then we

understand how it can work. But you look inside

other organisms. So there was an experiment done by the Quantum

Biology Institute that the.

Essentially, we raised tadpoles inside and outside of a

hypomagnetic chamber. The hypomagnetic chamber blocks the Earth's magnetic

field. So inside the chamber, 0, less than 1

nanotesla. Outside, you have the Earth's magnetic field, which is

roughly 50 micro Teslas. So it's worth like 50,000 times strong,

stronger. And we found that the tadpoles

inside the hypomagnetic chamber developed more quickly

there. There are other experiments with putting

organisms into hypomagnetic conditions. You block the

surrounding magnetic fields, and it has a bunch of different effects.

Change in growth rate is one of these there. There are a number.

But then the question is, how does it work? You look inside the tadpole, like

the tadpole embryo or the frog embryo, and

you don't find the magnetic crystals. So, okay, so

what's picking up the magnetic field? And then if

you want to really dig into that, one of the big options is

it's something from quantum. What is it that. I mean, I find

quantum biology really exciting, but I'm interested in what do you find exciting about

it? Well, the fact that it exists in nature. It's been there.

It's been there since now. Nature, and it's only

now or recently in the past, you know, couple decades

become apparent to us that it's there.

And we're Just, we're just playing catch up, you know what I mean?

We don't really understand it. And we, we talked about before how, you

know, the way people see is, is in quantum with,

with, you know, light, light wavelengths and, you

know, the way we taste and the way we smell.

Right. Or, or why certain processes work better

in, in, you know, in certain people. But then it

kind of makes me wonder like, why, you know, for example, you have all these

people who have like, diabetes because, like, their pancreas can't

manage the insulin. And I'm wondering, is, is the pancreas

quantum? You know what I mean? Like, can it all be

applied? Well, this is, this is what's really exciting

about it. It's the, I mean, there are a couple

different, like, really general arguments. You might

use that sort of,

like, like sort of queue up

quantum as a thing that might be important in biology. So it's like,

first of all, we've got, you know,

quantum just is our best understanding of how particles

work. Nature had

billions of years to take advantage of that accord. You know,

as far as we understand evolution, it will have taken advantage of that

every place that it could. And so that means

that it just, that's, that's an antecedent or an initial reason

to believe that, well, probably quantum is going to show up

somewhere in biology. But then you also have the

magnetic effects. Magnetism is one of the fundamental

forces. Technically, it's electromagnetism sort of go into that, but

it's essentially one of the fundamental forces. It

looks like it has effects on many different

organism types and cell types and different

proteins. And it's something that really hasn't

been studied very much at all.

Biology is still this big puzzle. Like we, if

you, you know, given all the things we know about biology, you

say to someone, okay, build a cell. They're.

They're not going to know how the thing actually

works from first principles well enough to actually be able to

do something like that from scratch. So we're clearly missing

something big. I think we're missing multiple big things. But

then magnetism, all of quantum, it's.

This stuff has got to be there somewhere. And so then the question

is, well, how do we actually explain these weak magnetic field

effects? How like, you know, we're not at the

point where we're going to be able to say, well, your pancreas does A or

B, because quantum. But

as we pin down what are the more pervasive

quantum effects that at least I believe

that we're going to end up Essentially finding puzzle pieces that will say,

okay, we thought we understood what was happening with your pancreas,

for example. Actually, to really understand it, here's all of this, you

know, 21st century science. I mean, that

makes sense. I mean, because, you know, we thought really, quantum has been around at

least in mathematical kind of theoretical spaces for a

century. I think in practical terms, maybe 20 years.

Well, it depends what you want to use it

for. What makes you think, what makes you estimate it at 20?

It's just a good ballpark number in the sense of, you know, we had lab

experiments that can kind of prove out a lot of these things. And I don't

call 60s and 70s. Okay, so 60s and 70s.

But there have been developments where, and

including through, like, there has been an increasing

focus on being able to

interact with quantum phenomena. This is quantum computing.

You also have quantum sensors. And

this has helped move us to a situation

where we're actually ready now to start directly

probing quantum states inside cells. Like, that

is a very exciting prospect. It's a thing you can actually

do. This is the Quantum Biology Institute's main project.

You've got, you build a microscope that shines,

a laser. The laser bounces off a bunch of mirrors and then goes into

the cell. And then you hit the cell with

a weak magnetic field. And there is a

particular quantum mechanism that will produce different levels of

fluorescence based on how it works. And so you can actually

measure the light coming off of the. Coming

off of the cell or proteins inside the cell. And that

will give information about how long quantum states

actually exist inside cells. This is, as I said, this

is the Quantum Biology Institute's main project.

This is the sort of thing that we can do now. And

we are. That's a good way to put. I mean,

I think that we, you know, I don't think we know enough yet to really

know how far this rabbit hole goes.

And I think that it's only been in the last number, whether it's two decades

or, or five, six decades, that we knew that there was a rabbit

hole. And I think as we were able to kind of explore it, I think,

I think, I think it can only go up from here in terms of figuring

out what medicines, what treatments and things like that.

I do wonder, I do wonder, kind of like, you know, will this,

will this prove out things like, you know, that feeling you get, you think of

somebody, then they call you, right? Or like little stupid things like that, you know,

but like, you know, what sort of, what sort of sensory things that would have

Evolved, that would have made sense for, you know, animals.

Right. You know, one of the, one of the, you know,

it's. I don't know if it's folk wisdom or, you know, hearsay or what's. There's

another fancy word for it, circumstantial evidence that, you know, before a

big tsunami or an earthquake, animals start freaking out. Right?

What, what, you know, is that true? Whether or not it's true, like what

would in the kind of the, the strictly classical view of

the world, like, that's not really possible. Right. There's not lighty many mechanisms,

but you start adding quantum, like, certainly there's more avenues for that to be a

thing. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really interesting. The.

So animals are. Many animals are able

to detect the Earth's magnetic field. Sharks are an

example. Birds seem like an

example. The magnetotactic bacteria do

rotate, but that's a little bit different of a thing. But there are a bunch

of animals that can detect and very

plausibly use the Earth's magnetic field as part of migration.

So then there's a question of, well, and

can humans detect a magnetic field? So when you walk around,

you are walking through a magnetic field. This causes electromagnetic

induction, could conceivably have an effect on some of your

neurons. But we don't, at least

mostly the vast majority of people, don't notice a

large effect when you turn and face north, for example.

And so then there's. Okay, well, is there actually this sense?

Now there's an interesting experiment that was done. I think this was

a team led by Joe Kershank. I think this was Caltech.

What they did was they had people sit in a chair

blindfolded, and then they rotated a magnetic field

around their heads. And it caused

in some of the subjects a distinguishable

measurable change in the brain waves of

the people, the alpha waves in particular. So, okay,

that's, that's interesting. The brain, it seems, is

picking up a change in a magnetic field.

How does that work? In this particular experiment,

they did a thing to rule out one

quantum mechanism. And in general with magnetic effects in

biology, we don't super solidly have the answers, but

quantum is a, you know, major contender. And

then if humans can subconsciously detect

magnetic fields, what does that mean?

And, yeah, and there are definitely are people who have

proposed that, you know, you think of your friend right before you, before they call

you that there's some sort of, you know, entangled state

happening. The thing with those, those sorts of

proposals are really interesting because to be able to

actually get to the point where we could test something like

that, there were all of these building blocks that need to be put into place.

Like let's figure out how humans are responding to

magnetic fields at all. And then

looking at how that works, are there things that would let us

explain some of these weirder phenomena? I mean,

just because, I mean, not to go all like woo

woo on it, but like, you know, I think about that guy

Tyler Henry who, who you know,

talks or has some kind of interaction

with people beyond the grave. And the things that he reveals

to the people that he's reading are just

undeniably, you know,

correct and weird. And so and

since energy, when people die, you know, they,

you know, their body is gone, but their energy doesn't disappear, right?

So, you know, I think that just because we

can't put our finger on it doesn't mean that it's not

certain people might be able to tune into it. And maybe

we've just removed ourselves so far from nature

that those kind of wavelengths are not

part of our world so much anymore. So I think

for hypotheses like this, I think in general

scientists have made a mistake which is that they

tend to dismiss this stuff out of hand.

Where I actually think the thing that's needed

is figuring out what sort of experiments

would allow us to control for different causal mechanisms.

So when I hear about someone being able to

read information in some way about a lost

loved one, there's a question about are they

interacting with the person, the deceased

person's energy in some way? Maybe they're subconscious, they're picking it

up off of the person who knew them in some way.

And then if they're doing it that way, it's going to

be by means of subtle non verbal

communication. And then how would something like that work? But

it's so it's. I think that for things like that you want to

think. I've heard people using quantum physics

to give retro causal

explanations of events. So retrocausal means that it's causing

it backwards in time. I think backwards

in time causation, that would, that would be a big deal.

I think it's worth considering whether in that, whether that sort of thing can happen.

But I was in a conversation with someone about this and I suggested, well, maybe

the people have already downloaded the information from each other

subconsciously, you know. And the thought was, well, okay, I hadn't thought

of that. And so I think the something that science can

do is it can help us to apply discipline to and

actually investigate these sorts of things. And for that you need

people to seriously think about what are the different causal

mechanisms and could you actually end up with entangled

states between people at great distances such that

you could end up with communication of one or another type? So I

think that that sort of stuff needs to be examined.

The public is interested. The, you know, there actually are

gaps in our scientific understanding. Scientists don't always like to admit

that, but that is absolutely true.

But in order to do it, we need research, you need a

research plan. You need to think through what are the different causal

mechanisms. So

that's really interesting. And there's a lot more causal like that

could be theoretically, like basically saying

there's a lot more going on than we're then we're aware of either consciously

or just in the scientific community. Right. Like, I think if you went back

in time and, and talked about radio waves, say

1700s, you probably would have been burned at the stake if,

if you weren't lucky. And if you were lucky, you would probably be sent to

some remote facility. I think, I think in

the seven, I don't think they would have burned you at the stake for radio

waves in the 17, the 1700s. But I agree

that, that you definitely, I mean, in the 1700s,

actually the late 1700s, you

get this phenomenon. So there's Franz Mesmer,

who, part of mesmerism is now a synonym for hypnotism.

But he basically thought that he had locked on to

a special type of magnetism he called this animal

magnetism, and essentially could produce what looked sort of like they

were psychic or telepathic type effects in people. And so

then, you know, the whole story goes this created a huge fuss and the

king of France demanded a commission. I think there were two commissions that looked into

it. One of them was led by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin comes

in, or at least his team comes, comes in, they run all these tests.

The thing that the Franklin commission came back with is

the phenomena are real. It's not

regular magnetism. We're done.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah. They actually

said we, you know, don't look into this more. But it's, it's

interesting because it's not going to be

magnetism as it was understood in the 18th century.

Then there's a question of have the developments in quantum

physics caused us to either understand

new ways that weird things could be happening or has it left

gaps? It's people, when they talk about quantum,

tend to talk about how weird quantum itself is.

I actually have been struck by how

much quantum shows us that we don't know. Quantum

physics itself is really not a complete theory. You talk to

different quantum physicists working on different things. They have different

analogies and metaphors. They all agree on the equations,

but it's not clear

what the equations mean. And it's actually really

hard to apply the equations in lots and lots of circumstances.

So you just end up with all of these. It's like,

is there a cleaner understanding of what's actually happening? Is that

possible? Like, what metaphor should be really using? What happens

when you're interacting with more than three particles or 30 parts? You can, you can

simulate up to some level. Actually, there's a link to

quantum computing there. One of the things quantum computing could be

helpful for in quantum biology or in

quantum physics in general is helping us to simulate quantum

states. The quantum equations are very hard to use. And so

you can't just take the equations and say, okay,

here's. Here's how a cell which has

a membrane and has water and has ions and has proteins

and all of this. Here's how it's going to behave. It's just not

computationally tractable. So we, like

quantum itself points the way to. There's

gotta be some further theory. There's gotta be new stuff for us to

understand. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's

a. You have to have. Best description I heard of it is you have to

have an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. Right. I think,

you know, there, there. You know, we had another guest on last season

where we were talking about, like, you know, she was talking about how Eastern

philosophy and Eastern thinking tends to allow for these things. And

if you look at Western kind of esoteric traditions, we

threw. We kind of threw all the baby. The baby out with the bathwater in,

like, during the Enlightenment, right. Where we became really hardcore and

empiricism. Not that that was bad because generally

speaking, steak burning kind of stopped being a thing. So that was the

upside. But the downside is that we threw a lot out with that.

And I think that maybe because of the new advances in science or

better understanding about some quantum effects and being. Being one of them

is like, maybe we're rediscovering. Like maybe it wasn't all hokey.

I, I think that that's a. A very

interesting line of investigation. It's. When you, when

you have things that are repeatedly reported by people,

it can sometimes take a while for the scientific community to

actually figure out that those things are real.

There's. In some ways there's a sort of good reason for this,

which is that not all reported things are actually real.

I'm currently no on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, for

example. The.

But things that are commonly reported also things that

people report being useful. There's tons.

You'll hear scientists from the western tradition making fun of

chakras. For example, chakra

system's been around for a while. There's really fierce competition in

the area of systems that will help you to understand

your body and healing. So I think that

there is a prima facie reason to

investigate anything that has been around

for a while or is reported by a bunch of people. And

then you want people who actually understand

the science, understand what we've figured out and

understand what is not figured out so that it's

possible. The other thing that's great about the scientific method is you.

You can make progress. Like you can come to understand things.

Things before there was St. Elmo's Fire, the

electrical phenomenon where you get this glowing on the ship's mast

and in a. In an 80s movie. But yeah, okay,

the. It's. It's the. That sort of thing where

it's absolutely real. It's seen by a lot of people. How do you

explain it? It takes a while to get to the point that we

can explain it adequately. Well, and that's just going to be true for a lot

of things. Is that also called ball lightning as well?

Is that like another. Or is that ball lightning is a different. Ball lightning is

a different thing. Ball lightning, you get these.

This is one where I was trying to track down the reference. I had heard

the story that people had reported it, but scientists didn't believe it

until an airplane with scientists was maybe

coming back from a conference and got struck by a lightning bolt. And then a

ball lightning, which is just a ball of lightning that sticks together like went down

the aisle and they all saw it like, okay, it's real. But I haven't been

able to find where he saw that. Stories. I've not been able to verify that.

But that's the sort of thing a ball. Ball lightning.

You get balls of lightning that move around. They're different colors and sizes

and last for longer than you would expect.

Yeah, and then there's also. There was also something called red sprites,

I think, which pilots had reported for years, but it wasn't

until satellite images of them were seen.

Basically. They tend. I don't know the details, I don't pretend to know details, but

they tend to appear in major thunderstorms. Right. They do tend to.

These tend to pop out effectively

randomly. But pilots, like high altitude pilots, military pilots, would

see them on a regular basis. And scientists would be like, yeah,

okay, you're probably like oxygen deprived or something. But when they

actually had, like, an orbital satellite would see them and they'd be like, oh, this

is the thing. Yeah, well, and this, this is. This is one of the things

where it's. You science is.

Is empirical. It's based on observation,

but there's error in observation. And one of the

things that theory does is it helps you to keep a handle

on where you would expect error in observation.

And then you end up with false positives and negatives. So you can end up

with circumstances where an effect is real, but you don't have a theory,

and so you haven't really looked into it. And this is what we're doing with

magnetobiology. There isn't a good theory to explain the

weak magnetic field effects. And so some people are like, I

guess they're not real, but it looks like they actually been

observed. So now the task is, how do we explain it theoretically?

I'm sorry, Candace, go ahead. It's like that area in Canada

where grab the gravity is not as strong,

and like, cars roll backwards. And I think it's in

Hudson Bay. Oh, there's a bunch of these places. These are like little tourist traps.

I don't know. I don't know how they get away with that. I haven't looked

into that. But there are actually satellites that do. So

I don't. I don't know how legit. I don't know anything about Hudson Bay. I

know there's one in Pennsylvania between here and where my in laws used to live.

But there's also. There also are satellites that

have measured kind of weird variations in the earth's

magnetic field. Whether or not people could detect that consciously, I don't think we

can do it consciously. Whether or not that has an effect on us unconsciously,

who's to say? Right. And one of the. Another

thing I want to point out is, like, you know, maybe the fact that I

can't turn my head and like, know, like, hey, north is in that

direction. Right, Right. I think we also remember our cognition is

geared not towards for us to explore the environment. Our cognition is

biased towards keeping us alive. Right. So me knowing that I'm

like, 2 degrees off magnetic north matters very little.

Knowing that there's a cyber tooth tiger coming this way. Right, right,

right. And this is you Know, you could imagine, like evolution is

frequently. They're not always going to kick out the stuff that's not helpful.

And so maybe sharks kept it because they're

traveling long distances. And in addition to an electrical sense,

it's useful to have a magnetic sense, but maybe humans kicked it out. The, the,

the animal studies, I think are, are quite challenging because

there are so many different ways that

you could have an effect. Like the birds navigating using the Earth's

magnetic field. It's. How much is it the Earth's

magnetic field versus how much is it sight and memory?

You know, you could say, well, they navigate, you know, when they're first

born, so they haven't seen it. It's like, okay, but how much do birds actually

communicate information to each other? Okay, well, that, that.

Now, now. Okay, now we're at. This is extremely hard to know. And so

you can have cases where magnetic effects

are real, but it's one of five causes or it's

like a small contributor. This is why I like the physics approach,

basically, where you look at

what the physical laws allow and

then you look at what you observe, especially in

circumstances that are better understood, at least to start with. And then

you try to figure out some way to make B make sense using A.

And that's, that's, that's the big challenge. That's, that's a hard thing to do.

Oh, science is hard, man. It's

exciting. It's exciting, you know, like, you know,

the different ways you think about the quantum mechanics.

And in a way, it's, it's, it's about,

it's about information processing, right.

And, and energy transfer.

That's very exciting when we think about what, what is it, what does it mean

in terms of evolution? Like, like you said, you know, they, they, you

know, I'd love to talk more about evolution, you know, with quantum

mechanics. Right. Like, you know,

I wonder if there's certain things that are, are then optimized

that maybe shouldn't be, but

that is what moves forward in the evolutionary process or

if that matters at all. I don't know. What makes you wonder?

I'm sorry, makes you wonder is you mentioned, I think it was tadpoles.

They grow faster in the absence of a magnetic field. Yeah. What's that

going to mean for if ever humans colonize Mars? Like,

will we be overrun by like, Martian frogs? You know,

like, you know, will the Martian frogs be like these giant things because there was

no magnetic field? I don't know, like, little things like that. I mean, like, These

sound like really kind of out there stuff. But this, this is going to have

practical application at some point within our lifetimes,

I would say. I think so. The, with the one I want to

know about is whether the Earth's magnetic field

has any effect on the

sperm and egg basically for humans. Like, is there some way

that the Earth's magnetic field or the

electromagnetic radiation environment that we currently live in,

how does that affect conception

and the development of a

newborn like these, these are fetus. The,

these are. Mars does not have a

magnetic field that is

the same as the Earth's. It's variable. It's not the same strength.

Oh, so it does have one. It, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, it's not, it's. Yes, it's, it has.

I was looking at different research, different people classify it as

yes or no, but there, there is a magnetic field and I believe it varies

and I believe it's a different strength than the Earth. Okay, okay, but, but then

there's a question of what does that, what does that do to

fundamental biological processes. Right. And I'm not sure

it's possible to run experiments on this. And this is something that I,

the DAO has a bit more of a collective decision making process.

But one of the things that I hope we end up looking at

is what happens if you

raise human reproductive cells

inside a hypomagnetic chamber.

Does it do anything to the sperm or the egg? Like, does,

does anything happen if you block the Earth's magnetic field?

I'd love to know that. No, I think that would be an interesting thing because,

you know, will they become like the X Men? Like, is that going to be

the. I mean, something like that or will. It be,

Will it be. Or maybe. Because I think it's also a valid thing. Right. If

you look at way we live today versus where we, how we evolved,

we are bathed in electromagnetic radiation now in ways that

nature I don't think ever intended. And as far as we

know, it's probably. Okay, well this is, this

is, there's a, there's a difficult question here. So,

and this is one of the things that the quantum biology DAO has

been looking into pretty slowly, but we're making progress. You

have, the Earth has a magnetic field, but there

are also electromagnetic waves. This includes light

and radio waves and X rays and UV light

and so forth. Essentially what

these differ both in that the electromagnetic

wave has an electrical component and the magnetic

component is oscillating. That makes it so that you

can have different effects on cells or on proteins.

And there's a really interesting question. What

do the electromagnetic fields we're now

surrounded by, what effects do they have? I think we can rule

out that there are

large acute effects.

And that's because we would know you'd turn on your wi fi

and you would blackout. That's not a thing that

happens. So we know that there aren't large

acute effects. It's possible that there are chronic effects.

These are the sort you can imagine, effects that happen over

10 years, 20 years. And then it would just.

And then there's a question of are there such effects? And if there are, what

are they? One interesting data point is that some people have

noted that there seem to be

a mass extinctions on Earth

seem to be timed at least some degree with reversals of the

Earth's magnetic field. Okay. If

we evolved in a way that's taking advantage of the Earth's magnetic field

in a way that's not well understood, you know, parentheses.

Probably because of quantum or possibly then.

Well, maybe when the Earth's magnetic field switches, this causes a

major problem and we don't. And it causes a problem. Not

on the scale what. One of the

blind spots I would suggest for a bunch of current science

is in time frames. You have so many experiments

that are done on a very short time frame. The

what if you end up with effects that happen over the course of a couple

hundred years? That's.

That's going to be hard for us to figure out. We switch on

all the emf. Now nothing seems to

happen. Our cells get affected in some way, check back

in in 200 years, and now you're actually starting to see effects

that. I don't know, I'm not sure. But we do have

this timing thing with the Earth's magnetic field switching

and mass extinctions. So there's a.

Is that real? Is one question. And then what does that mean? How does that

work? It was too soon to say either way. It sounds

like if you had to kind of bottle that up into a sentence. Right. It's

hard to say definitively either way at this point. Yeah, I agree

with that, but I'd love us to figure out an advance.

Because I think at some point. I'm sorry, Candice. No, no, no, go ahead. So

one of my favorite TV shows and book series is the Expanse. And one of

the, one of the things was how physically people will evolve

in different gravity environments. And that's kind of obvious, but one of the subtle, more

subtler things in the book was that there was a Cottage industry of people that

would, I guess one or two of the

saddle. The asteroids have an actual stable magnetic field,

at least according to the book. And people would basically

freeze their. Their sperm and egg cells and store them there because.

Okay. Thinking it would be more protected. It was. It was a throwaway line in

one of the books. And that's very cool. There was

also made it into the TV series where

the Earth delegation is going to Mars. Because Mars in the story

is a separate country, right? And they noticed, like, hey, look,

there's an aurora. There's an aurora

borealis on Mars. Like, wow. It's like, oh, yeah. Their engineers just got

the magnetic field going. Okay. Like so. Like little things like that. That's why I

thought. So

let me ask you this. What would constitute a true

breakthrough that would convince skeptics

that quantum biology is

foundational and not fringe?

Let's see. I.

I think there are a couple different answers. So

the. And it's. It's not so much

fringe as it's thought of as just not

necessarily that important. I think the

thing that would show it

to be important. So there's a couple avenues.

So first, one

of the different people don't pay attention to quantum

biology for different reasons. One is that

a bunch of people, including physicists,

think that the quantum states actually go away too quickly

for them to have an effect in biology. The way

that this is usually phrased is in terms of

heat. It's called the KT problem, where essentially you

imagine that inside the cell there's heat. Heat is

being given off, but heat has a randomizing effect.

And so if you have small effects, but they're

occurring at a level that is much smaller than

your randomizing effect, then your small effects get lost

in the random noise. I think that that's the

main scientific concern, or you

could phrase it as an objection to quantum

biology. And an experiment that would

show a really important experiment would be one that would show that

that's. That that quantum states last for

however long inside cells I mentioned. The Quantum Biology Institute is

building a microscope. This microscope

will allow it to detect the duration of quantum states

inside cells at room temperature. If it comes back,

that is just picosecond level quantum

states. That's a big negative for quantum

biology. If it comes back in the hundreds of nanoseconds,

then it's all still very short. But that's very positive

for quantum biology. So actually getting a measurement

of the duration of quantum states inside cells, that.

That one's really important. I think the.

I think that getting a,

an effect. So from the biochemistry side, if you could get

a magnetic field effect that you could

control that would cause a

4x or 10x level of

let me say 5 to 10x change in some factor,

then I think people would care about that. Pharma might start to think

okay, 5 to 10x we can use magnetic fields.

Let's start using magnetic fields to influence how proteins

are behaving. So I think that one that would be,

and there are some studies that report

fairly large effect sizes. I think that's where I'm getting the 4x from.

But that I think replicating those sorts of studies

or finding things that show even larger effects, I think that that would be really

valuable. And then I think the,

the thing you really want is you want an

ability, you want a theory that

tells you why something's happening along with

an observable where you can produce a new effect that you

haven't seen before. And I'm not sure what this would be

in quantum biology. I also work with some people

and I mentioned and it was not. Yeah, sorry,

losing track. Lots of conversations. I also work with people working on quantum

material science and nucleonics. The,

one of the potential effects from some of their work is

making it so radiation goes away much faster than expected.

Like there's a normal radiation decay rate. Yeah. Imagine if you

could deradiate nukes so that you're your radioactive waste.

So it's like okay, it's decayed now. Now the thing is safe.

The, if you can produce an effect like that

where the, and you have a theory that

says how you can do it, then I think basically you win

for quantum biology. I have some ideas for what that could be.

I'm, I myself have mostly been trying to figure out

what are possible theoretical

explanations for the magnetic field effects. It's, it's very

strange. You know the simple version is you have a

stationary cell that has

no known large magnetic particles. So it's not like

magnetotactic bacteria. And you apply

an earth level magnetic field. So let's say 50 micro

Tesla. And it has an important effect

on, on the cell function.

How, how would you, how would you explain that and that if you can give

an explanation of that, then I'm like okay, great.

Interesting. And just so you know, just the, the magnetic fields are

measured in something called teslas, right? Yeah. Not the car.

And when you say nano tesla, it's not a little toy car.

I, I, I only realized this when I went to get an MRI

some years ago. It Said something like it was so many mega teslas or something.

Something like that. Yeah. So MRIs are. So Teslas are really

strong as far as magnetic fields. So 0.5 is. I think

MRI is 0.5 and greater the.

And so then, yeah, the earth is 50 millionths of a

Tesla, and so that's much smaller. And this is actually

part of the reason that people don't think about

magnetic field effects is you can go into an MRI and there

aren't obvious adverse effects. And

so you think, okay, well, this isn't. I mean, it's a really strong field.

It's. So then magnetic fields don't seem to have an effect on

biology. The, the interesting

response is that there's a question about

whether there's a sweet spot where I need

to. I need to figure out a way to say this less technically,

but particles have a feature called spin. Spin.

When you apply a magnetic field, it can cause spins to align. A

strong magnetic field can cause the spins to all align. And

then as your magnetic field gets weaker, then the

magnetic field from the nucleus of the atom can interfere. And so

it may be that there are interesting effects that can occur when your

magnetic field is smaller than or much more

comparable to the strength of the magnetic field

coming from the nucleus of the atom. And that's. So then.

Yeah. And so this. This would mean that something like MRIs are sort of throwing

people off. Throwing people off track or giving. Well, like, what would happen if

you put a shark in an mri? Would it be like, what the. What just

happened? You know, like, what it. No, I'm just. Something like that. I don't know

if that's ever been. Tried, but I mean. So people have subjected

birds to electromagnetic radiation, and that

can throw them off. That's one of the reasons that people think that

birds navigate using the Earth's magnetic field is because you actually

have a. You have an effect where you can disrupt something. But the thing

is that the. The field strength that they're using is

one that's larger, as I understand it, than occurs in nature.

So it's, It's. It might be

that you could disrupt it with particular

mechanism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the mechanism that's operative in

nature anyway. There's. Right. You could. Max. So they may be only

really to take in up to a particular level of input. And once you

go beyond that, all that's going. Yeah, it's

just fascinating. Like, this is. This is all on the table now, right? Like, in

terms of what's possible. Sorry, Candice, to cut you off.

No, no, no, this is fantastic. I mean, we can have a whole another

conversation just about Spintronics and like, I

love it. I love it. So. No, no, I

got so many more questions. We're gonna have to ask them to come back.

For sure. For sure. I'd be happy to come back. That's cool. Thanks for

talking to us. Thanks for explaining Daos and. Oh, sure. That alone, I

think, I think that alone has some interesting possibilities of reform and

science funding. Right. Like, there's a lot of things that. That could

enable that. Yeah, I think so.

There's the. And just as a. Yeah, as a thought,

there's indication that people

are actually taking more of a look at these things. The National

Science foundation recently issued a

call for information because they're planning to fund a bunch of

independent research organizations. This is outside of academia

and outside of industry. I. And

the only reason they would do that is they think we need to make faster

scientific progress. And it doesn't. You know, people are

worried about the pace of progress coming out of coming out of

academia. So it's like, what can

you do with independent labs? You could conceivably do a

lot and you can do things that are outside the

sort of previously received narratives and, and you can do them in

new ways. Which means we can figure out Quantum. We'll figure out how

quantum works in biology, figure out how magnets affect everything,

and we can fund it in a new way at least. I'm excited.

No, that's very cool. That's very cool. Where can folks find out more

about you and what you're up to? So check out

leverage.instute that's the leverage website.

We will have a new website ideally within, you

know, a couple of weeks. And actually, if this podcast is published in a little

while, then maybe by the time this is published, then we'll.

We'll have our new website up. But yeah, I can learn about what we're up

to and affiliated organizations and

like, essentially there is this attempt to

advance the actual frontier of science

and to do so using. We're happy to

work. We've got some academic partners and we've got

people outside of academia. The thing that matters is

advancing the frontier, and a bunch of us are doing

it. Very cool. Fantastic. Thank

you so much, Jeff. Thank you so much for today. Absolutely.

Thank you, guys. All right. And we'll let the outro music play.

In my mind at last. Quantum podcast. They're breaking the

mold. Science and sky beats and bold and it's gold.

The multiverse is skanking Skanking in time Black holes

are wailing in a horn line so fine from plank scales to planets they're

connecting the dots Candace and Frank, they're the cosmic

hot shot.

Quantum podcast, turn it up fast Candace and Frank

blowing my mind at last Quantum podcast, they're breaking

the mold Science has got beats it's bold

and it's gold.