As 2025 ushered in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, recent discoveries in quantum information science have demanded a distinction between the first wave of the quantum revolution—which gave birth to lasers and transistors in the 1950s and 1960s—and “Quantum 2.0” breakthroughs like quantum teleportation, quantum key distribution, and noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers.
Now quantum biology, the field that describes how quantum processes like superradiance, tunneling, and entanglement influence biological processes and function, is receiving its own update.
In a landmark review published in Protein Science, a team of authors from the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University provides a much-needed overview of the current terrain in “Quantum Biology 2.0”, highlighting a perspective shift from the in vitro and ex vivo work of earlier decades to a whole-biosystems integrated approach. “Our group's discovery of superradiance in solvated protein fibers in thermal equilibrium opens a new window on the role of quantum processes across the web of life,” said Dr. Philip Kurian, QBL Principal Investigator and Founding Director. “This review thus provides the necessary vision for a renewed research program geared toward the understanding of biologically oriented scientists, who are interested in how quantum processes play a role in enzyme catalysis, evolutionary behavior, and sub-neuronal brain mapping across living systems interacting with the electromagnetic field, even at the ultraweak or single-photon level.”
Though for many years the prevailing dogma was that quantum effects would be destroyed in the turbulent maelstrom of life's warm and wet conditions, researchers have continued to reexamine many of the old assumptions about decoherence, and the role that protein environments can play in supporting excitonic coherences through structured vibrational environments. “It has been known since the 1950s with the advent of the maser that phonons, like photons in the laser, can concentrate in specific vibrational modes of complex molecules like proteins,” said Dr. Kurian. “These vibrating proteins with giant dipole moments act like nanoantennas in solution, electrodynamically coordinating structural organization, function, and behavior. And we’ve known since the time of James Clerk Maxwell that these signals are not exponentially screened by the counterions common in biological environments.”
Though considered a relatively emergent discipline by some, the roots of quantum biology stretch back more than a hundred years. Pieces of the puzzle began to crop up in the 1920s, around the birth of quantum mechanics, when Niels Bohr began reflecting in lectures and articles on the intimate relationship between “Light and Life”. In the same decade, Alexander Gurwitsch observed that “mitogenic radiation” emitted by onion roots could induce mitosis in the cells of spatially separated root specimens. With the proliferation of modern single-photon detectors, these signals because of their low intensity became known as ultraweak photon emissions, which remain an active area of research for understanding the electromagnetic signatures of metabolizing organisms. Generated through standard metabolic processes and environmental stress-induced pathways, electronically excited free radicals like reactive oxygen species relax to produce ultraweak photon emissions from a variety of living systems.
Erwin Schrödinger, whose name rests on the central equation of quantum theory, was also concerned with quantum effects in biological systems. His 1944 work What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell ignited a firestorm across multiple fields of science, addressing how the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics would constrain the known properties of biological and chemical heredity in a living organism. These insights inspired the search for the DNA double helix, whose structure was uncovered from X-ray crystallography data less than a decade later in 1953. The field of quantum biology grew out of this rich legacy, and the new perspective of Quantum Biology 2.0 extends the study of quantum effects over multiple scales, integrating how light is essential to coordinating structure, function, and behavior from atom to organism.
Dr. Judith Klinman, professor emerita of chemistry and biochemistry and biophysics at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the work, was impressed by the manner in which the review motivated and detailed the relevance of quantum biology to the protein science communities. “It is quite challenging to convey sufficient depth while integrating the wide range of topics required to understand the nature of quantum effects in proteins and living systems. The Kurian Group has highlighted a compelling research agenda in quantum biology for the next decade and beyond."
