Quantum research sheds new light on how cells communicate
Have you ever thought that light might hold a key to life's mysteries? One hundred years ago, Alexander Gurwitsch dared to propose that living cells emit faint ultraviolet light, invisible to the naked eye, to communicate ...
It was an idea so ahead of its time that many dismissed it outright. Without a physical theory to back it up, his idea was relegated to the chronicles of history. Yet when I encountered his work, I couldn't help but ask the question: What if the UV effect is quantum mechanical? Armed with modern quantum theory, I began to uncover a new quantum dimension to life itself.
A century-old mystery revisited
In the 1920s, Gurwitsch's experiments revealed a startling phenomenon. Placing the tip of one onion root near the side of another, he noticed that more cell divisions occurred on the side of the root facing the tip. He observed that the effect disappeared when he placed a glass slide between the roots.
Curiously, when he changed the material of the slide from glass to fine quartz, the effect reappeared.
This mysterious light, which he called "mitogenetic radiation," passed freely through air and quartz but was blocked by glass, distinguishing it from visible light and some frequencies of infrared. He concluded that faint ultraviolet light emitted by one root tip stimulated cell division in the other.
At the time, the idea that light, not hormones or other chemicals, could drive such a fundamental process seemed implausible. Skeptics dismissed his findings, and the phenomenon faded into obscurity.
A photograph of Gurwitsch's onion experiment with the emitter onion held in the inductor (a bowl to hold the inducing onion bulb, left), the receiver onion (in a frame to hold the induced bulb, top), and location of mitotic induction (center). Credit: A. G. Gurwitsch, Das Problem der Zellteilung physiologisch betrachtet (1926)
Drawings of onion root cross-sections of non-irradiated (left) and irradiated (right) roots. The line divides the irradiated root into opposite halves to show the increased number of cell divisions in the irradiated half. Credit: T. Reiter and D. Gábor, Zellteilung und Strahlung (1928)