Episode 90 · Quantum Biology, part 1 of 3 (follows episode 89)
Light and Coherence: What Photosynthesis and Vision Really Tell Us About Quantum Biology
A sceptical retired NMR physicist and a young ultrafast spectroscopist start a graded "ledger" on a houseboat lab, sorting every quantum-biology claim into established, strong evidence, contested, speculative or fringe. Day one covers light: how antennas funnel excitons, the Engel et al. 2007 Nature beats at 77 K, environment-assisted quantum transport, Duan et al. 2017 (electronic coherence gone in ~60 fs), the 18-author 2020 Science Advances reassessment, Brumer's sunlight objection, the 2023 single-photon LH2 experiment, the 2026 reviews, spectral densities and decoherence estimates, Marcus electron tunnelling, and the vibrationally coherent isomerisation of retinal (Schoenlein 1991, Wang 1994, Johnson 2015, Gruhl 2023), plus single-photon vision and a checklist for reading quantum-biology headlines. Wren Halloran and Augustin "Gus" Ferreira are fictional. Cross-references episode 89 (the Fudan mitochondria preprint).
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Inside this episode
- Cold open: the houseboat and the ledger
- What it would even mean for biology to be quantum
- Catching sunlight: antennas, excitons and the FMO complex
- Rings of light: delocalisation you can see
- Two thousand and seven: the beats that launched a field
- Noise as a helper: environment-assisted transport
- The reassessment: vibrations, sixty femtoseconds, and eighteen authors
- What survives: vibronic mixing, single photons and the twenty twenty-six view
- Decoherence by the numbers: the spectral density
- Electron tunnelling: the quiet quantum effect everyone accepts
- Vision: the fastest twist in biology
- Can you see a single photon?
- Lessons for engineers: what the reassessment teaches
- How to read a quantum biology headline
- The ledger after day one
Production credits & AI disclosure
Scripts generated with Claude Opus. Synthetic narration generated with Edge TTS. Reviewed, listened to, and approved by Sankalp Thakur.