WASHINGTON, DC – (September 23, 2026) 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."
Superradiance and Light-Matter Interactions in Life
First predicted by physicist Robert Dicke in 1954, it would take seventy years before the phenomenon of superradiance would be observed in protein fibers. Superradiance—where one or more photons can be shared coherently among a collection of atoms or molecules, resulting in their faster emission rates—is a distinctly quantum effect whose signatures in protein fiber networks were predicted and experimentally detected in 2024 by a QBL-led team. These quantum fiber optic networks form critical superhighways in all neurons, as well as in any higher organism without a brain, motivating new research directions for translating this discovery into transformative insights for the web of life, whole-brain emulation, and the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The QBL review highlights these revelations in a "superradiance primer", discussing this phenomenon in systems ranging from viruses to photosynthetic nanotubes and a diverse range of protein fibers.
As quanta (discrete packets) of the electromagnetic field, photons are key players in the interplay of light and matter that supports life. Photosynthesis, perhaps the most critical chemical reaction on this planet and dependent upon the power of the sun at the Earth's surface, was widely investigated in the Quantum Biology 1.0 era, and several of these studies are synthesized in the review. Superradiant behavior has been observed in photosynthetic nanotubes and in green sulfur bacteria's photosynthetic antennae, illustrating how collective and coherent behavior underlies one of life's most fundamental processes: the transformation of light from the sun into chemically stored energy, by and for living systems. A critical distinction is made in the review between the physics of sunlight-driven photosynthetic complexes, and the ultraweak light-matter interactions that can occur deep in the water column of oceans or in vivo from metabolic processes, and which show potential for use as diagnostic tools in a wide range of diseases.
Quantum Effects in Protein Dynamics
According to the outdated wisdom, proteins – as relatively huge and massive macromolecules – are too large to be considered in discussions of quantum phenomena. However, from the electrons and protons composing their smallest building blocks and mediating their fundamental processes, to coherent condensates consisting of multiple proteins, and even in exploring optically excited behaviors of whole organisms, quantum effects are ubiquitous.
In the 1960s, physicist Herbert Fröhlich theorized that excitation energy could accumulate or "condense" into a low-frequency vibrational mode by coupling with phonons (quanta of atomic nuclear vibrations). Similarly to superradiance, it took many decades for experimental observation of this phenomenon to occur in protein systems, with reliable signatures of Fröhlich condensation not validated until the mid-2010s in the proteins lysozyme and bovine serum albumin. Quantum Biology 2.0 contextualizes Fröhlich condensation and provides an explanation for one of biology's great mysteries: how do chemical reaction partners find each other with such speed, accuracy, timeliness, and specificity in a crowded cellular environment? Energy condensation in phonons leads to long-range electrodynamic communication through collectively vibrating proteins with huge dipole moments, effectively creating microscopic antennas that help cognate binding partners self-organize across the intricate, seemingly cluttered environment of a cell.
In the Quantum Biology 2.0 era, it is increasingly evident that quantum superposition, tunneling, and entanglement at mesoscopic and macroscopic scales must be considered to arrive at a more accurate picture of biosystem dynamics. The QBL review considers, for example, the critical importance and supermajority of water molecules required for life. At a molecular level, water's reliance on hydrogen bond networks for its structure is a subtle quantum mechanical effect. Hydrogen atoms or protons, because of their low mass relative to carbon, can more efficiently quantum-tunnel through energy barriers, affecting processes from enzyme catalysis to DNA mutations and double-strand breaks. Many-body effects like van der Waals and Casimir-Polder forces, which take quantum vacuum fluctuations and polarizability into account when modeling molecular interactions, have been shown to be essential to the formation, stability, and function of large biomacromolecules. These many-body effects are key to understanding protein energetics, protein-water interactions, protein folding, and more obscure phenomena like the anesthetic effect of the noble gas xenon.
Quantum phenomena in proteins are also central to explaining the discovery from the 1960s that some migratory birds are able to sense Earth's weak magnetic field, a characteristic which has since been observed in a range of organisms from bacteria to plants and mammals. The "radical-pair" mechanism of magnetosensitivity harnesses the fundamentally quantum property of electron and nuclear spin, which are affected by weak magnetic fields. This results in proteins with different quantum states forming and propagating different chemical reaction products depending on the magnetic field and local biomolecular context, and creating a downstream sensory input for the host organism. Investigations into magnetoreception were a pillar of Quantum Biology 1.0 research and continue apace. Improvements in experimental spectroscopic tools and refined theoretical models have widened the aperture of the Quantum Biology 2.0 perspective shift from individual chemical reactions to real-time control and modulation of signalling pathways and their resulting information transfers.
Quantum 2.0 for Biology, and Biology for Quantum 2.0
The QBL review also highlights how developments in quantum technology have made their impact on experimental tools for probing quantum architectures in living systems. For example, improvements in single-photon detectors and electron multiplying charge-coupled devices have been integral to higher-fidelity counts of ultraweak photon emissions in vivo, and advancement in materials science has led to the development of quantum sensing devices that rely on fluorescent nanodiamonds or quantum dots for enhanced sensitivity to local magnetic fields. In the field of biological imaging, the use of quantum light—generated from nonlinear, squeezed, or entangled sources, and as part of the Quantum 2.0 revolution beyond lasers and transistors—unlocks a new realm of tissue observations. Using quantum-entangled photons for spectroscopy can enable ultralow-power imaging and sensing of long-lived quantum states, reducing disturbance or destruction of delicate tissue samples in the process.
Biological systems also serve as inspiration for their own technological breakthroughs. This has been evidenced by the work of the QBL and coworkers on Physarum polycephalum slime molds and their remarkable computational capacities, which—despite lacking a brain or neurons—can solve difficult logistics and exploratory search challenges like the traveling salesperson problem. Other recent works employ proteins as biological quantum bits bridging quantum computing with biological systems.
A Paradigm Shift, Realized with Time
The era of Quantum Biology 2.0, marked by a perspective shift to multiscale, whole-biosystem observations, is one of interdisciplinary research seeking pertinent, frontier research questions at the boundaries. "Our goal has been to describe some of the key physics behind quantum biology in a manner comprehensible to molecular biologists and protein scientists, and to hopefully allow for some quantum tunneling through the field's entry barrier," said first author and graduate student Margie Christ.
In this complex research environment, landmark literature reviews function as crucial beacons for those wishing to pursue deeply interconnected knowledge frameworks, without being set adrift in an unending sea of tangential inquiries. "This is the most comprehensive and insightful review of the last century of quantum biology that I have encountered to date, and it will remain a key reference text for students and researchers for many years," said Professor Jonathan Woodward of the University of Tokyo, an international leader in spin physics and magnetosensitive photochemistry, who was not involved in the writing of the review.
At 98 pages and covering almost 600 references, including homage to ancient sources like Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner from circa 240 BC and Ibn al-Haytham's 11th-century Book of Optics, the authors hope that interested scientists, other scholars, and dedicated students will dive in, one section at a time.
