The Spark of Life

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0:49Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster. So I was a bio major, and we had to take maybe one physics class, and then we never thought about it again. And this is often how it goes in the sciences. You've got biology, the environment, animals, our bodies, the kind of organic, messy physical stuff. That's on one side. And then you have physics, all the abstract stuff, waves, energy, invisible particles. That's all on the other side. I know how to use these. They very much feel like two different worlds. Can I ask you a couple questions before we get started? You can ask me so many questions. But for Narosha Murugan, they go hand in hand.

1:33I'm Narosha Murugan, an applied biophysicist from Waterloo, Canada. And most biophysicists look at mostly bio. though I'm on the other end who likes to be 50-50. What I learned from talking to Neurosha and what you're going to hear in our conversation today, it is definitely a leap into the unknown, but it starts with a very simple idea about how living things, bacteria, cactuses, humans, whatever, how they do what they do. And it's an idea that made me think about the kind of mark we leave on the world. So we're going to start with Neurosha. as a student? I mean, I can tell you a very specific moment in grad school that...

2:17Tell me. When I was living in the dorms and I was making mashed potatoes and I burnt myself. And then, I don't know why I thought this, but I thought it was really exciting. Yeah. How quickly that information of me burning my hand went into my body for me to move my hand. Like that signal had to go up my arm, things had to change, and move all the way back down my arm for me to remove it. Think of the molecular interactions. Nurosha says she was standing there thinking about all the little molecules in her skin and nerves and spine, all these proteins bumping into each other, interacting and passing along a signal, burn, ow, until it reached her spine.

3:01And then a signal goes back, more proteins bumping into each other, interacting, signaling, move, move your hand, move your hand, back down her arm all in a split second, and suddenly it just seemed impossible. When we think about a protein, proteins have a very specific shape, and that shape determines their function. So when you think of a cell doing what it needs to do, on the surface of a cell, there are other proteins, which is what we call receptors. And those receptors have a shape to them. And for them to interact, there needs to be a physical interaction of that protein into the receptor.

3:38Yeah, there's this shorthand that we use for talking about biology, which is that a lock and a key go together and that makes things happen in the cell. Correct. So something is a shape and it fits into a hole. It's as simple. That's the fundamental basis of biomolecular interactions. But thinking about all that for that one specific molecule to find that perfect receptor just seemed like it was too easy. Really? Yeah. I like, wow, this is why you were a better bio student than I was. Cause I was like, I don't know, there's a lock, there's a key. Like one of them is the lock shape. One of them is the key shape.

4:18The key goes into the lock. It's just floating along. It finds it. So that, that's exactly, that's the model that didn't sit well with me. So imagine you're one of those like janitors with like a big ring of keys. How do you find that right key for the right lock in that right amount of time to induce signaling? You got to go through all those keys. You got to try, iterate through random probability and get the right shape in the right space. Yeah. And with also, if you think about like the interior of a cell, it's like there's thousands of other proteins and there's, you know, trash and there's the nucleus and there's, I don't know, endoplasmic reticulum.

4:55There's like all sorts of things inside the cell that are between the lock and the key, between the two shapes, like finding each other. Correct. This is what I was like uncomfortable with is think of that time and think of the probability of you finding your shape in one thousandth of a second. Damn, it's pretty fast. It's like the janitor took the ring of keys and just threw it at a lock and somehow the right key on that ring gets into the lock and like it makes it across the space, even though there's so, so much in the middle. Yeah, exactly. And that's just like one interaction. And so if you kind of break it down that way, and that's what I learned in school, things weren't adding up.

5:41There's something missing. There had to be something else to induce signaling inside of a cell. So my advanced immunology teacher in grad school, I, after class, went up to him and I was well, how does that lock and key model make sense? Think of the time and the probability. And I asked him that question. And he said, I don't know, but this is how it works. I'm like, no, but how? I'm that annoying crash student. But can you tell me a little bit more? Where does the time fit in? And he said, this is just the way it is. I don't know how it works. And that I don't know was enough for me to figure out maybe I can go find out that I don't know.

6:32As Narosha kept puzzling this, she thought maybe there's something in physics, the world where particles are always zipping around really fast, maybe there's something there that could help me out. The gap that I was trying to fill is that how can the chemistry, how can the physical interactions occur so quickly? Why can't we have the same thing, but through non-physical interactions? So the way that I kind of like picture it is maybe if you had a door with a tap card access versus an actual old school locking key, you can open the door both ways. Either the proteins can do it, that will take a longer time to do the behavior, or like a wireless tap where you can just kind of put a card against a key receiver.

7:20and there's a signal or a door opens. So, okay, what can be faster that cells can use to communicate? What is the fastest signal that we know? Light. It is the fastest modality that exists in our universe. And then you go out, or what I did, is to research to see if anyone else has asked those questions and how they test them. And through my research, I found the original papers that showed that biology emits light. Biology emits light, yeah.

8:02What Neurocia stumbled into was a weird little corner of biology pioneered by this Russian biologist, Alexander Gerwitch. In the 1920s, he did a series of experiments on onion roots to understand how they grow. And I'm going to reveal with you, the original paper is in Russian. It was kind of a crazily complicated experimental setup. But basically, in the process of doing these experiments, he made a discovery that seemed to suggest that the onion cells inside the roots were making and releasing their own light.

8:48It was the very first instance that someone thought, hey, biology emits light. That was the first experiment. What we now know is every cell in your body does give off light. Every cell. Every cell. Any kind. Heart cell. Liver cell. Brain cell. Cheek cell. Skin cell. Liver. Tongue cell. Everything. And the how kind of comes down to the part of the cell that's actually giving off light, which is involved with metabolism. So if anything can metabolize, plants give off light. Shrimp give off light. Literally everything that is alive emits light. So I'm glowing right now. You sure are. You're glowing right now.

9:31Absolutely. Why can't I see it? Because that's a good question. Finally, we get to one. No, that's fantastic. We physically can't see it. It's because the intensity of light is so weak. And, you know, it has to come and go through all this tissue to come outside so that we could see it. And so if you take a cell in a dish, any cell in a dish, it will give off light. And we now know very confidently that it's wavelength specific. What does that mean? Different rates of metabolism will induce different wavelengths of light, so different colors. So not only am I emitting light or cells are emitting light, they could be emitting light of different color.

10:15Correct. Wait a second. So when my friends try and like drag me down to get my aura red, is that this? So the intensity of light is definitely not as bright as some of the aura pictographs that you might see. Okay. For us to detect it, we have to have an ultra dark room and use these high sensitive detectors to even detect one photon. Okay, so if I'm a cell and I'm giving off light and maybe we have to pick a specific cell, I don't know. How does that actually work? So let's dig into that a little bit. We know that light gets emitted from cells. The question now is, where exactly is it coming from?

11:01That's the question that I get all the time. What's the mechanism? My hypothesis is that most of it kind of comes down to the mitochondria. So you probably know this. One of the structures inside the cell is the mitochondria. It looks like a microscopic kidney bean with tiny little folds inside of it. And it is often called the powerhouse of the cell. Hey, Internet. It creates all of the energy that makes us run. So that's neurons firing, muscles contracting, bodies working. It all comes from the mitochondria. And the way that works is molecules will pass electrons back and forth to each other all along the inner folds.

11:48And that process of passing releases energy. So in that process, the electron goes from a high energy all the way down to a low energy state. Is like a high energy electron like a kid with a lot of sugar and then like a low energy electron is like when they cut out off the sugar? That's one way to look at it, yes. Yeah, so during that hop, it releases energy, which is light. Dad, this part is like the juicy part. So you're saying that, I don't know, we're giving off life because we're doing fun things with our electrons. Because we're alive. We're because, yeah. There are a number of different ideas about where light could be coming from inside the cell.

12:36It could be these electrons. It could be a buildup and release of charged particles. It could be something having to do with fatty acids. It could be a combination of things. For Neurosha, she's finding that when she interrupts that electron chain, the light changes. If the electron doesn't make it, there should be no light, right? That's the logic. And that's what we're starting to find. Do you have a sense of how many photons a cell is emitting at any moment? Yes. So when we've measured it. So if you take a dish of brain cells from a rat, if it's just at rest, just doing nothing really, you probably get around 100 photons a second.

13:22When you add a dish of brain cells, like how many brain cells is that? About a million. So say a million brain cells emitting 100 photons a second as a group. As a group, yeah. And then when you activate them, we get signals anywhere from 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 photons a second. Okay. Okay, wait. I got really lost in an image of the mitochondria just releasing fireworks all the time. I was like, oh, these little cells are popping off. It's like after a baseball game on the 4th of July. Yeah, that's probably accurate. And is it that light that I might potentially be seeing if I had an amazingly dark space?

14:10That's exactly it. Yeah. Okay. Why did I not learn about this? That's an excellent question. That's something that I would like to change. I think there's a lot of resistance to trying to understand this. About like 10 years ago when I first started this stuff, I had my first backlash when I presented this as a graduate student at a conference. Oh. It was awful. Wait, what happened? I presented our first, because I was really excited about this, so I wanted to incorporate this into my graduate thesis. And oh boy, did I get it. Oh, this is noise. This is not science. You're going to jeopardize your career.

14:52stop this, go back into cell biology. I wonder if some of it is like people have been like, nah, it's bullshit. Because it's like we've already talked about auras. I can imagine like a lot of folks being like, no, this isn't legit. I think there's a lot of that. But within the last decade, it's not just me. There's several other researchers across the globe. So now there's an acceptance of, okay, we'll believe it. There's light coming off of biology. Now the resistance is, okay, we accept that there's light coming off, but it's noise. It's not meaningful light that's used in biology. So what I'm looking into now is, okay, light's being generated from the mitochondria.

15:36Does that light carry some form of information that the cell can use to do what it needs to do? Is it purposeful and then being utilized by the body? Yeah. So I was thinking, okay, we're sitting in a bath of light that's coming from this big ball of fire, which we call the sun. Does this light have any impact on our physiology? Like, you know, okay, before I understand internal light, what does external light do? I see. You were just like, how are we interacting with external light? Does any of that apply to the internal? To the internal light we're making. The light's the same. The photon is the same.

16:12For example, there are these proteins called opsins in your eyes that help convert different wavelengths of light that help regulate circadian rhythms. I guess that makes sense to me because the eyeball is a light - Sensing organ. Light-sensing organ, and so it senses light. But that's where my light interaction shuts down. And it sounds like you're saying there's more light interactions happening. Yeah. I mean, if you go to any literature, the first thing that will come up is vitamin D synthesis. Is that, okay, the sun hits your skin and your skin processes vitamin D and, you know, that does a lot of things for metabolism.

16:56So you're saying like my skin is working with the sun. Absolutely. Absolutely. So like sun hits me, correct? And then what does my body do? The vitamin D precursors absorb a certain wavelength from the sun. They're absorbing wavelengths. Yeah, there's information in that light. And they convert shape. That shape is what we can absorb. Oh my God, I never thought of us as so plant-like. Yeah. Yeah, we are essentially like energetic converters, converting sunlight into energy for our life. Wait, is that the only direct interaction I have with the wavelengths from the sun? That I'm like actively converting?

17:36No. We have light receptors in our brain. Seems so dark in there. Exactly. Our pigment cells, like, you know, the melanocytes, hemoglobin that carries the oxygen within your red blood cell, absorbs light. Okay. There are a lot more, and we're starting to see more and more as people start to look at interactions with light, we can see that molecules have inherent abilities to absorb light. We as creatures have evolved with the sun for so long that there are many, many elements of our cells that are able to absorb light. And so now the question is, if that's the case, could the light coming from inside of our cells also be absorbed?

18:20Could it be used purposefully to trigger some processes in us? Yeah, that's a good question. And we don't know. My hypothesis is that the cell generating light is purposeful, but we don't have the evidence to strongly say yes or no. So we really are in a lot of like theoretical ideas. Like once we get beyond the revelation, which will be a revelation to a lot of people that biological material cells, me, you, are emitting light. Then a lot of the questions that come after that of like how, why, when. What does it mean? What does it mean? That's TBD. Those are all next steps. So I think, yeah, there's some like a lot more questions to be asked.

19:19Coming up, Neurosha tries to find out what the light inside our bodies might be doing. What are those little photons up to? The cellular fireworks continue after the break.

19:44Hey, I'm Molly Webster. We are back. We're stepping into a world of questions. And one of the first ones Neurosha wants to tackle is how what seems like a cellular firework show might actually be more like a laser or something. I mean, and then the next question, if this light that's coming off of these mitochondria if it's purposeful how is it getting from point a to point b in the cell like if there's a purpose to the light and it's it's directed and it's directed it's a sentinel of information like well i don't know isn't it a photon don't they just flow through things when it's like photons scatter right okay so like photons when it gets released it's not like i'm going this direction it'll be scattered i'm not going north i'm just an explosion yes photons photons and if If we are going to say that it's purposeful, it needs to be guided into a destination.

20:40So then your question is, how does it get from A to B without going off course in a photon-like manner? Correct. And what is the biology that would support that? And there is some evidence suggesting that maybe the cytoskeleton is a means to guide photons. What's that? Cytoskeleton? Yeah. It's the skeleton, the scaffolding of the cell. Okay. It's specifically made up of various proteins. And the one of our interest within this scaffold is called microtubules that form in a long rod-like structure. They're the ones that help create that shape of the cell. So every cell is filled with individual little tubules that are help giving it its shape, little rods.

21:26And your question was, do those things suck up some of the light? Correct. Because if we look at images of a cell, you can actually see mitochondria really, really close to the cytoskeletal rods. And they get moved along the cytoskeleton, like little train tracks, to physically move within cells. Oh, mitochondria themselves will attach onto these microtubules and move around. Yes. And that's how things move within the cell. It's not just like random blobs floating around. I don't know. It sounded like everything was floating. There's a little tram system inside the cell. Yeah. That's so cute. And like things hop on and off.

22:10Exactly. They're called kinesins and dinesins. I'm going to stick with tram. Sure. But so, you know, if the mitochondria are in close proximity to these railway tracks or these microtubules, the light that's being emitted could be absorbed by that microtubule and be propagated down that track, like in fiber optic cable. Huh. And so what we're testing right now is a series of experiments to see if the microtubule is that biological fiber optic cable. Okay, but do you have any proof thus far that that light is not just being cast off like fireworks into the cellular night, that it is actually being moved from an A to a B?

23:02We are working on that currently right now, but we do have strong evidence to show that the light that's being generated from neural cells, your brain cells, they are not random, that they are tied to purposeful activity of those neurons. So when there's activity in the brain, there's light in the brain. That's correct. I mean, do you have any hypotheses of like what information light might be carrying inside the brain? Well, it's the same kind of question. What kind of information does electricity carry? I don't know, Nero-Shah, I just asked the questions. I'm not... No, no. No, but the information in this case is that the fact that, you know, maybe the wavelength, the oscillations of these light, the fact that they could carry biological information itself would be meaningful.

23:59Because if you look into your brain, between your two brain cells or, you know, things that carry information from one part of your brain to the other, we call that the white matter or the axons. The white matter we're starting to see can carry photons. So maybe each of those bundles of nerves act like a fiber optic cable. And the same fiber optic cable that we see in telecommunication, they carry pulses of light that, you know, that we use to carry information. Why can't our brain do that? And this could be like memories. Is it like signals? A thought. Why can't a thought be transported in the form of light?

24:41And it kind of, you know, if we're really thinking far ahead, are these photons involved in trying to help us understand consciousness? Oh.

24:55There's honestly so much about this world of light inside the body that we don't know yet. Some of the researchers describe this field as risky, like it could all add up to nothing. But if they're right, it could change everything, or at least a lot of things. For Neurosha, even if she doesn't know what the purpose of the light is inside the body, like, even if there isn't one, it might have a purpose for us outside the body.

25:33What myself and a few other people are doing is, the photons are there. can we use it to discriminate between things? If they're at the very least tied to metabolism, are they photonic biomarkers? Like, can I say, I know that's a heart. I know that's a tumor. I know that's a kidney. That's it. At the very least, can we do that? And so what I'm trying to do is use that for cancer. So for cancer use, we know that cancer have dysfunctional mitochondria or non-normal. So from there, can you imagine if when at the very beginning inception, we can pick up that early change as soon as they happen, as soon as they're different from their healthy counterparts.

26:16If we can pick up that using photons, that means we can pick up cancer as early as the inception point. We don't need to have an accumulation of molecules and mutations. We don't have to wait that long. Yeah, you need like a whole tumor. Yeah, you need a sizable mass, basically. To say, oh, hey, your body's growing cancer. Right. I guess the question then is, is there a significant difference between the photon release in cancer cells versus other cells? Yes. And we've shown that and we've published that. They have two different light signatures. So with the light coming off cancer, you guys are actually diagnosing cancer earlier?

26:53Yes. Yes. With confidence I can say this. We've published papers on this now. So we can tell whether there is cancer within an animal as early as that we've injected it. So in these experiments, we'll take a rat and we have injected underneath its skin melanoma. And on day one after injection, and we did this in a double blind way where a grad student has come with detectors to look at animals that were injected versus not injected. You can tell within day one. that there's something, there's cancer there. Wow. So even if it's like, even if the light was not biologically purposeful, you're thinking maybe it could still be diagnostically useful.

27:43Mm-hmm. So it's like, basically, we've walked through, I'm just going to make you say it again, but you've walked through brain cells that let out photons, tumor cells that let out photons, Normal body cells that let out photons. You're saying everybody, every cell that you've looked at is letting off photons. Absolutely. And there was a paper that was published that showed that you can tell when an animal is alive and dead just by looking at their photon signatures. Oh, my God. This is the question I want to ask you. Yeah. When does the light start? And then does it truly go away? Yeah. Yeah, so in that paper, I think the initial study was to just look at these different kinds of detectors when an animal was alive and dead.

28:34And the photon signatures obviously dissipate when the animal dies. What that study didn't look at, which you alluded to, is when. When in that time scale does this signature end? And that would be really cool. When does the glow stop when you're dead? For example, in like hospice care, people report this death flash. What's that? I originally heard about this when I went to a consciousness conference and there was this cardiothoracic surgeon. He would say that he's seen it or his staff in the OR has seen this like very sudden flash of light. And I'm like, you have like OR lights everywhere. Like how?