the quantum underpinning of life

Quantum mechanics and molecular biology were the two revolutionary scientific disciplines ‎that grew out of the twentieth century: quantum mechanics and molecular biology. ‎quantum biology can be said to have been initiated by a physicist, erwin schrödinger, in ‎his lecture, essay and book entitled “what in life” (published in 1944) in which he ‎proposed that that heredity was based on non-trivial aspects of quantum mechanics. the ‎book was very influential to molecular biology pioneers, such as james watson and francis ‎crick, who went on to discover the double-helical structure of dna. thereafter the field of ‎quantum biology largely languished. however, the twenty-first century has seen a revival of ‎quantum biology with the arrival of new experimental evidence of quantum mechanical ‎effects in a range of biological phenomena such as photosynthesis and enzyme action. in ‎this talk i will provide an introduction to quantum biology, returning to schrödinger’s ‎original insight that quantum phenomena may be found in biological processes that involve ‎very numbers of molecules including photosynthesis, enzyme action, avian navigation and ‎mutation.‎