Story by Cassian Holt • 5d • 

9 min read

Quantum behavior spotted in living biology for the 1st time

Quantum effects are no longer confined to ultra-cold chips and vacuum chambers. For the first time, researchers are deliberately engineering living cells so that they behave like quantum bits, hinting that life itself can host the strange rules of superposition and coherence that usually belong to physics labs. That shift is turning “quantum biology” from a speculative idea into a testable framework for understanding how organisms move energy and information.

Instead of treating cells as noisy bags of chemistry, scientists are now asking whether they can be programmed to act like components in a quantum device, and whether natural systems already exploit similar tricks. The answers emerging from protein-based “biological qubits,” quantum-style information processing in microbes, and new models of energy transfer suggest that quantum behavior in living matter is not a curiosity at the margins but a frontier that could reshape both medicine and computing.

Why quantum effects in living cells once seemed impossible

For decades, the standard view in physics was that quantum behavior collapses as soon as you leave the pristine conditions of a lab. Quantum bits in today’s machines are typically isolated at temperatures close to absolute zero, shielded from stray vibrations and electromagnetic noise. By contrast, a cell is warm, wet, and crowded with molecules constantly bumping into each other, a setting that should rapidly destroy the fragile superpositions that define a qubit. At first glance, biology and quantum technology seemed fundamentally incompatible, a point that researchers like Aug have emphasized when describing how radical it is to even attempt a biological qubit.

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