Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Life=Matter+Information: Paul Davies and the Demon in the Machine

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and author Paul Davies’ new book explores what he believes to be the defining quality of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere. He talks about this and much more in a special, extended conversation. Paul’s book is one of the prizes in the new What’s Up space trivia contest. Learn more and enter the contest at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0219-2020-paul-davies-demon-in-machine.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Talking about the demon in the machine with its author Paul Davies, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. The full title of Paul's new book is The Demon in the Machine, How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life. And even that audacious title doesn't do the book full justice. On this special episode, we'll talk with Paul for nearly an hour, followed, of course, by our latest look at that crowded night sky with Bruce Betts. We've got a copy of the book for the winner of Bruce's new space trivia contest. Planetary science and missions dominate our review of the latest headlines in The Downlink, the Planetary Society's digest of the biggest stories from around our little universe,

are collected each week by editorial director Jason Davis. Alan Stern and the science team behind NASA's New Horizons mission released new results from the spacecraft's flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth last year. The findings published in the journal Science further support the notion that Arrokoth's two round lobes formed in the same region of space and came together in a slow-speed collision. With NASA's 2020 rover now in Florida for its summertime launch, we've learned that the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover has made it to France, where it will be mated to its

descent module. The critical parachutes needed for the mission are still undergoing tests. The critical parachutes needed for the mission are still undergoing tests. NASA announced the selection of four mission concepts in its relatively low-cost discovery program. The only shame is that all four may not be funded. Two aim for Venus, another for Jupiter's violent moon Io, with the last targeting Neptune's Triton. The field should narrow to two later this year. Lastly, your latest opportunity to slip the surly bonds of Earth without having to buy a ticket. NASA is taking applications for the next astronaut class. The window is open from March 2nd through the 31st. Who knows,

you might end up on the Moon or Mars. You can always find more at planetary.org slash downlink. Don't forget that we're about to expand the downlink. Life equals matter plus information. That simple statement is at the core of Paul Davies' wonderful new book, along with consideration of the origin of life on Earth and elsewhere, whether exotic quantum mechanics is utilized by living things. The staggering complexity of a single cell and much more. Paul is Regents Professor of Physics at Arizona State University.

That's also where he heads the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. A fitting role for this latter-day Renaissance man who is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and more. The Demon and the Machine is, I believe, his 31st book. I recently sat down with Paul at the University of California, San Diego, where the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination allowed us to use its studio. Paul Davies, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It has been a long time since we talked about your book, what, about 10 years ago, The Eerie Silence. I loved that book, but this book is as awe-inspiring as any nonfiction I have ever read.

So thank you for The Demon in the Machine, which was what we'll talk about over the next few minutes. Well So thank you for The Demon in the Machine, which was what we'll talk about over the next few minutes. Well, thank you for being so enthusiastic. And we will also, if your publisher is agreeable, we'll make a copy available to the winner of this week's Space Trivia Contest that we'll get to in the What's Up segment of the show that will come after this conversation. I want to start really where you finish the book in your epilogue. It's led by a quote from Albert Einstein. One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is. Do you believe

that understanding life on Earth and possibly elsewhere is going to require a new understanding of physics. I do. Now, I'm a physicist, and one doesn't say lightly that there is new physics going on in life. But this quest to answer the question, what is life, goes back many, many decades, and most obviously to Erwin Schrodinger, who in 1943 gave a series of lectures, famous lectures in Dublin, Ireland, which was neutral during World War II, asking the question, what is life? The key thing is, can life be understood by physics? Well, I think every physicist would say, well, of course. But the real question is, can it be understood by known physics or does it require new physics? Schrodinger was open-minded

about it. I've been open-minded about it my entire career, reluctant to suggest new physics, but I have now come to the conclusion that yes, we need new physics or we will discover new physics in living systems. So biology is the next frontier of physics. Because you brought it up, I mean, you mentioned these lectures by Schrodinger at a couple of places in the book. He was quite the visionary with these lectures. explained non-living matter all the way from atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, right up to stars. So enormously successful. But it wouldn't explain living matter, not readily anyway. And so fast forward from the 1920s, which was when Schrödinger and Heisenberg and others put quantum mechanics together, to now the World War II years. And here is Schrodinger

somewhat isolated from the mainstream because he's in neutral Ireland. He didn't join the Allied war effort. He's living there with his wife and his mistress and able to indulge his fancies by turning his attention to this really deep problem about the nature of life. And there was a lot of speculation in the 1930s that, you know, was quantum mechanics going to explain life or wouldn't it explain life? And what did it take? And he gave these lectures, and it's widely attributed to Schrodinger, what we think of now as the birth of molecular biology. So Creek and Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, were famously

influenced by this book. A lot of other people were. And so it was a very influential book. But then the decades rolled by and everyone was rushing to understand life at the molecular level. And in my view, lost sight of the big picture, that life is much more than what's going on at molecular level. Which is much of what you address in this book. There's a very simple equation, or at least statement in the book, which is in the biggest typeface in the book. And it is life equals matter plus information. matter plus information. Does that mean that you believe that information is the distinguishing quality of what sets living matter apart from the rest of stuff? It is. And of course, I have to explain that information in this scientific context is not just like when we use it in

everyday life, information in a bus timetable or something of that sort, information as a physical quantity. Now, there's a historical precedent. We use the word energy in daily life, and it's got sort of rough and ready meaning, but physicists define energy in a very precise way, and it enters into the laws of physics. We now know that information properly defined

enters into the fundamental laws of physics, into the laws of thermodynamics, in fact. And the demon in the title of the book refers to something called Maxwell's demon. And just to take you through the history of this, so in the middle of the 19th century, there was a lot of interest in the nature of heat. And James Clerk Maxwell, then working at King's College in London, made seminal contributions to the theory of heat. And he came up with a curious thought. It was not much more than a musing, which he put in a letter to a friend. some diminutive being, which came to be called a demon, who could see and follow molecules in their paths and then direct them using a shutter mechanism to one side of a box or another.

By doing that could accumulate the fast-moving molecules one side and the slow-moving molecules the other. And now because molecular speed is a measure of temperature, the demon would in effect have used the information about molecular motion to create a temperature difference, and any competent engineer could then build an engine to run off that temperature difference and do useful work. So it looked like information was a type of fuel. But it seems paradoxical, it seemed to fly in the face of the cherished second law of thermodynamics, which says basically you can't get something for nothing. It looked like Maxwell had invented a perpetual motion machine.

And this lay like an inconvenient truth at the heart of physics for decades and decades. But now, just in the last few years, nanotechnology has advanced to the point where we can make, I say we uh my experimental colleagues can actually make maxwell demons they can uh make these little devices which use information about thermal agitation to gain a work advantage you can only do it on a nanoscale this isn't going to revolutionize kitchen refrigerators anytime soon but nevertheless the principle is established that information is a source of fuel. It enters into the laws of physics. So it has some physical

purchase. And that's the point. It's the little chink that opens the way to explaining how information can make a difference when it comes to the amazing things that living organisms do. You've reminded me of a clever little science fiction story once written by the great Larry Niven, where it was the time of magic on this planet, and a wizard visiting another wizard in his cave wonders why it's so much cooler in the cave, and the host wizard says,

Oh, it's really quite simple. I cast this spell, and I have this little sprite or demon who kicks out all the fast-moving molecules. It was a demon air conditioner. Right. You mentioned the second law. It is the demons, therefore, maybe among other things, who help living things like you and me to at least temporarily win the battle against entropy? So one of the distinguishing features about life

always comes up in conversation is it seems to buck the trend of going from ordered to disordered. So any of our listeners with teenage children would know all about this. Just look in their bedrooms. You know, it's very easy to make things messy, very hard to clean things up. But life does seem to go the other way. It seems to create,

as Schrodinger expressed it, order from order, ever more order. And so it seems to go the opposite way. Now, some people have seized on that and said, oh, therefore it's got to be a miracle or something. Not a bit of it, because when you look at the whole picture, you see that the order in living organisms is paid for by disorder in the environment. And so the books balance. But within the organism itself, remember, life is an open system. And that's a really important point of trying to explain what is going on. It's not a closed system. It's an open system.

And then down at the molecular level, within cells, they are replete with little Maxwell demons, chuntering away, carrying out the business of life, playing the margins of thermodynamics. Some of these little engines or motors or little devices are almost 100% perfectly efficient. And I'm thinking, for example, of the way DNA gets copied. There's a polymerase motor. There are other little motors that pump protons and so on. And these are operating right on the edge of perfection. We can't do that with our machines in daily life, except in nanotechnology. And so life has perfected, and obviously did billions of years ago, this ability to play these margins. The case that is most striking, although when you look at the details, the demonics are not 100% efficient, but they're still good.

The case is the human brain. efficient but they're still good the case is the human brain so here we have something with the capability of a megawatt supercomputer but operating at the level energy level of a dim light bulb and that just shows how incredibly thermodynamically efficient information processing in this thing between our ears can be so we obviously still have much to learn from biology up here in the grosser physical world. Well, there are two things here. One is that we can certainly learn how to play a few, as it were, thermodynamic tricks that would improve the performance of our macroscopic systems. That is undeniably true. But I think it goes deeper than that, because information in biology is more than just thermodynamics. We tend to think of information in a, as it were, a management or supervisory role, that there are, the information in biology is much more than that contained in

our genes. That's what most people think of. They think that the codebook of life or something like that. But genes don't act in isolation. They switch each other on and off. They form complex networks. Information swirls around these networks. A lot of people study that. Patterns of information, information flow. It goes right on up to the level of cells that signal each other.

They're signaling molecules. So they signal chemically, but also we now know electrically and mechanically this information transfer is taking place, and right up to social insects that engage in collective decision-making, for example, or you think of the coordination of birds in a flock. In fact, it goes right up. When you look at the information,

the web of information of life on earth it's on a planetary scale and i like to say that the biosphere is the original worldwide web it is a web of information and that information is doing more than just improving the thermodynamic efficiency it is behaving in technical terms that this information is semantic. It means something. So the parts of a genome, the coding parts, the genes themselves, are coding for something. And I should mention that that information is encrypted and has to be decrypted and then expressed. Ribosomes make proteins using that information that flows from the DNA. proteins using that information that flows from the DNA. So that level of information processing means that this is more than just bits of information. It's information which has meaning or context and can be interpreted by the ribosome and then expressed. And that notion of meaningful

or semantic or contextual information is something that we have no idea how to incorporate that into physics. That's where the new physics will lie, trying to understand, go beyond just the thermodynamics of this to that realm of semantics. But we know it matters. We know it makes a difference to the way organisms behave. It's got to have physical effects. You have in this touched on, really just scratched the surface of the complexity of life, even of a single cell. You made me remember as I went deeper and deeper into these mind-boggling complex processes that life has mastered just within a cell. just within a cell. When I was in high school biology class, I remember being blown away because I learned about these tiny fibers, which before a cell splits in mitosis, these fibers reach out to the chromosomes or chromatids and literally pull them apart before the cell splits into two.

Where is the choreographer? Yes, exactly. And I thought, even at that time, I thought, oh my goodness, this is so complex. That's nothing compared to some of the complexity that you talk about in this book, within a single cell. No, it is truly staggering. And in fact, one of the great challenges is to put a measure to that, just how complex. Can you measure

complexity? All sorts of different ways you might try and do that. Can we somehow understand whether that complexity grows over time? Is there a fundamental law of the growth of complexity? When we look at the biosphere, it looks like there are certainly more complex organisms around today than there were. Is that a trend or is it just an exploration of the space of possibilities? All these things are unresolved. But the complexity, the level of complexity is truly staggering. And I think there has been a tendency to say, well, life seems like magic because it is so complex, but deep down at the level of atoms, it's just known physics. That's sort of the God of the gaps argument, right?

Yes, yes. And I think this sort of over-reductionistic view, well, if we knew enough about the physics of individual molecules and put it all together, we'd have an explanation for the totality. And I just think that's wrong. And I think to be hung up on the complexity. So it's a little bit like the problem of trying to explain some sophisticated bit of computer software by saying well we could in principle give a complete explanation in

terms of where the electrons are moving in the microchip and if we listed all this and it would be very complex but you know we'll give an account of what is going on on your computer screen. And we all know this is an absurd way of looking at it, that you talk to a software engineer and you'll be given a fairly compact description of what is going on. So the real causal story in the case of a computer, take something like Photoshop or PowerPoint or something like that, an explanation for PowerPoint will come without making reference to the underlying circuitry or anything of that sort. And I think that's where we need to move to that situation with life. We need to use this software information type language. And I'm not alone in that.

So Paul Nurse, the former president of the Royal Society, has written very eloquently on the need to think in these sort of informational terms and comparing living organisms a bit to computers or electronic devices where we have modules that fulfill certain well-defined functions, for example, logical functions. Even microbes can carry out logical operations. We don't have to worry what's going on at the molecular level. We just have to say, what is this module doing?

What is its function? How is it communicating and sending information to other modules? And looking at those patterns of information flow, that's where we will really come to understand life, at that software level. So I can use my Windows laptop without being able to write or modify the code in Windows. Right. But really, that's where the mysteries lie. Yes. So I like to say to me, Windows seems like magic. Life seems like magic. We know they're not

magic, but we know that you will fail to capture an adequate description of both of them if we just want to talk about electrons flying around wires or something of that sort. Something obviously is directing all of this, and the common assumption is, oh, well, it's all in the DNA, right? It's all in that double helix. And yet, it turns out to be far more complex than that, as you explore in the book, because DNA, as you say, turns out not to be read-only memory, ROM. It's a read-write system. That's absolutely right. So what has happened over the last 30 years or so is an appreciation that the secret of life doesn't lie in DNA alone.

I think there was a feeling, well, you just sequence genomes of organisms and you'll get a complete explanation of what they do and how they do it. Genes are only good if they're expressed, and what determines whether genes are expressed or not? Well, there's this vague term called epigenetics. Epigenetics can involve all sorts of things from the cell and from its environment. So, for example, even mechanical forces acting on a cell can affect the genes it expresses. A famous example is called contact inhibition. You grow cells in a Petri dish. They will grow until they hit a boundary, and then they will stop growing.

So they sense their barrier in their environment. So just a simple mechanical effect like that can change how genes express themselves. how genes express themselves. You said, you told me before we started recording that you have colleagues at Arizona State who are also looking at these epigenetic effects on cells in orbit, in microgravity. That's right. So if you send bacteria to the space station,

they will express different genes from what they do down here. And that can affect astronaut microbiomes. So, for example, it may be that particular bacterium in our guts doesn't cause any problem down here, but feels different up there because this little microbe thinks, oh, I'm floating, and I'm going to express this gene and not that gene, and the astronaut may get sick. So this is the work of Cheryl Nickerson at Arizona State University. It's just one example of how physical forces affect gene expression.

The other one that I love is the work of Mike Levin at Tufts University. We have a research project with him, and he likes to chop up worms. And there are these little worms called planaria. When you chop them in two, the heads grow a tail and the tail grows a head. So you can multiply them very easily just by chopping them into bits. You can chop them into actually many bits. And the fragments from the middle, remember which way was the head and which way is the tail. That information is not in the genes.

This is a classic example of epigenetics because the morphology, the physical form of these worms is determined by something other than their DNA. So he can manipulate these worms to make them grow two heads and two tails. He does this by changing the electrical patterning. So we understand that electricity plays a really important part in development and in wound healing and in cancer. All of these things are related. He can manipulate them and gets two-headed worms and two-tailed worms. They have identical DNA, so identical genetics, but the epigenetics, the expression of those genes is quite different. And the most entertaining aspect of that is if he chops the middle out of normal worms with a head and a tail, sends those middles to the space station, about 15% of them came back with two heads.

My conversation with Paul Davies is far from finished. I'm just pausing for a minute so that I can once again thank Amazon Prime Videos' The Expanse for bringing you this week's show. You've probably heard my praise for season four of this superb science fiction series. Of course, I love everything about The Expanse, including the first three seasons of the TV series and all the books. Thanks again, Jeff Bezos, for rescuing the show when it was dropped by SyFy. To recap, without giving too much away, I hope, our heroes, the crew of the Rocinante, have passed through the Ring Gate, heading toward a distant world that has enormously valuable natural resources.

Earth has sent an approved group of miners, but a ragtag bunch of refugee belters has beat them to the planet. The inevitable conflicts that follow become far more dangerous when ancient alien artifacts come back to life. I can't possibly do it justice, so just hitch a ride on the Rocinante. The Expanse season four is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. Back to Paul Davies, author of The Demon in the Machine. How does a gene living deep inside a cell that is deep inside my body know that it is being in a different electrical or gravitational environment? I mean, it's just a molecule or a line of molecules.

Right. So this is where physicists by, have thought always in a bottom-up fashion. That is that we tend to think that physical effects are local effects, that we can always say what is happening at a particular point in space and time or to a particular subatomic particle at that particle. But when it comes to biology, that's totally inadequate. Now, there's a tendency to think that bottom up there that, well, a gene is a strand of DNA, it's a segment of DNA, and that it sends out a message and this is expressed as a protein and the organism then behaves differently. And there is obviously a bottom-up narrative,

but there's equally a top-down narrative that what is happening in the cell's microenvironment, signals it may receive from other cells or pressure or stress forces on the surface of the cell or electrical forces or gravitational, as I've explained, can act in a downward sense right down to the level of those genes and the genes that get expressed depend on that that environment so we need to recast the physics that's going on in in these cells to include a bottom up and a top down narrative, I come back to if we express this in informational terms,

then this is a lot easier to do. If you want to express it in terms of what molecule pushes which, it then becomes unmanageably complicated. But in terms of the information flow, it goes bottom-up and top-down. The case that I like best of all, I might say, is chromatin structure. So in eukaryotic cells, complex cells with nuclei, the genes are mostly in the chromosomes. And these chromosomes don't just sit there like you see in the textbooks. They have a complex architecture that is highly dynamic and it changes.

any changes. And for a lot of the time, a particular gene that the cell might want to express will be simply smothered by all of the, it's called chromatin, this material, all of the chromatin in its vicinity. And this chromatin then has to be reconfigured. There are all sorts of little wires and strings and things that will do that, has to be reconfigured in order that that gene is exposed to the readout machinery. And so this is another example of epigenetics, that the genes that get expressed depend upon this chromatin architecture, and that can be top-down as well as bottom-up. There can be forces from the environment that will change that architecture and lead to differential gene expression. This brings me back to consideration of evolution,

and specifically the mutations that apparently drive it, which I always thought, I think I was taught, that these were random. And you say in the book, maybe not. Yes, I think one of the most surprising things coming out of, we might call it the new biology, is that individual causes of mutations might be random. For example, cosmic rays, you know, wouldn't come with a plan. I'm going to hit this particular part of DNA or other. But there are many, many examples of mutations which, when you actually look at the statistics, appear to be non-random. Some of these are clearly self-inflicted. Now, we're very used to the

notion of gene editing. CRISPR-Cas9 technology now enables human beings to go in and edit genomes, so we can certainly do that. With unprecedented ease. That's right. But cells edit their own genomes all the time. There are errors and they edit them out, or they can choose to not edit them out. There are all sorts of ways that cells can. Their DNA is not just fixed. It's subject to these editing processes.

When you look at this more complex picture, it's very far from random. And one sees that in cancer biology, where certain particular mutations seem to arise again and again. These mutations can sometimes be gross changes. For example, transpositions of whole chunks of chromosomes. That's very far from random. transpositions of whole chunks of chromosomes. That's very far from random.

You don't see this, not Lamarckism, but you don't see this as a denial of Darwinism, so-called. No, an elaboration of it. Yeah, Darwinism 2.0. Yes. So a lot of people just fall for this trap just because the original version of Darwinism is inadequate to explain some important aspects of biology. It doesn't mean Darwin was wrong any more than Newton was wrong about the laws of gravitation.

We have a better theory now, Einstein's theory, that embeds Newton's theory. Science advances by better and better fits to the facts. And so Darwinism is astonishing how powerful it has been, given that it was formulated so long ago, and yet it has stood the test of time. But it would be really foolish to say that the austere original version of Darwinism, random mutation, natural selection, end of story, is going to explain everything. And now what we're seeing with this field of epigenetics is that we have to augment the original Darwinian scheme with all of these other features which are being worked through. And biologists working at the cutting edge are now completely familiar with it, but I'm not sure how much the general public has caught up with the fact that the old reductionistic view of Darwinism has really been superseded really quite a long time ago.

We will turn to cancer, but I'll start that by talking about your discussion of multicellular organisms, including yours truly, that this represents a contract between individual cells and the organism. Perhaps a topic for another day would be this jump from maybe, maybe not, life is a natural process within the universe, the origin of life, but a lot of scientists believe it's this jump from the single-celled animals, bacteria especially, to you and me that may be the bigger hurdle. But it is this ability to collaborate, to cooperate among all these cells, which you talk about in the book. Yeah, two billion years ago, there was one imperative, replicate, replicate, replicate, because this was the realm of single cells.

And that's all they had to do. So they were immortal, in effect. And then along came this other way of doing life, which we now call multicellularity. It's actually evolved many times. And what happens here is that the immortality of cells is outsourced to specialized germ cells, like eggs and sperm. The rest of the cells, so-called somatic cells, in the collective, in the organism, they're part of that contract,

is that they can replicate for a while or they can be sustained for a while, but eventually they're supposed to die. We have stem cells that can replenish them. And for the organism to work properly, you have to avoid cheating. What happens, say, in an organism like a human being is we've got all these different specialized cells, kidney cells, liver cells, skin cells, and so on,

and they have to listen to the regulatory signals that they get. You die now, you die now, you get replaced now and so on and if it's all working fine, it's a very complex layer upon layer of regulatory control. But if something breaks down, either part of the regulation or an individual cell decides to cheat, then cancer results. And so this is a contract struck between the somatic cells of a body and the organism as a whole about one and a half billion years ago. So I mentioned that multicellular laboratory has evolved many times, and that's over a period between about one and a half billion years ago and a few hundred million years ago. And so that contract breaks

down and the cancer cells are making a bid for immortality. They are a throwback. They're trying to wind the clock back to the glory days of replicate, replicate, replicate. My understanding of cancer is that it is a reversion or a throwback or an atavism, and that we have to understand it that way if we're going to treat it properly. So cancer is, it's the downside of multicellular life. Right. So it's great for the cancer cells because they're reawakening their inner immortality, but of course it's bad for the host.

But the cells don't know that. They don't know that they're in a host that has a different agenda. And so they're very successful in their own way. But because their proliferation is really life 101, so this is when life began, the most fundamental thing that it had to do was to proliferate. And it then had to learn a whole lot of tricks to combat challenges to its proliferative ability.

For example, if there were poisons, then it would pump them out. Or radiation, you know, learn to repair the radiation damage and so on. So there are all sorts of ways that individual cells spend billions of years coming up with defense mechanisms to combat their proliferative ability. But unfortunately, most cancer treatment tries to challenge that ability. It targets the replicative, uncontrolled replicative prowess of cancer cells. But you're sort of on a hiding to nothing because that's the one thing that cells really know how to get around. And they evolve around whatever you throw at them pretty quickly.

And so part of the reason cancer is such a dreadful disease is because of the development of resistance to chemotherapy. So targeting the strength of cancer in that way is always going to be fighting a losing battle, I'm sad to chemotherapy. So targeting the strength of cancer in that way is always going to be fighting a losing battle, I'm sad to say. But if we want to be smarter about tackling cancer, we tackle its weaknesses, not its strength. It is eventually not healthy for the cancer cells themselves. They die with the organism. Oh yeah, but they don't know that. They don't know this is going to happen. But if only we could reason with them. And in a sense, doesn't that,

in a somewhat fanciful way, address how you think we should attack this problem? I mean, we need to change the flaws in the information. They're not really flaws. That's quite right. My dream is that if we treat, if we think of cancer in these informational terms, that this will be a little bit like we were talking about, you know, Photoshop or PowerPoint. You have a bug in the program and it's doing this annoying thing. You know, what can we do about it?

And sometimes you can go online and download a patch, you know, and it sort of fixes it. Sometimes you actually have to reinstall the operating system you know and all things in between imagine if we could treat diseases like that we could reboot cells or or download patches that would take care of some of these flaws and and it may be this isn't a perfect fix but what you want to do is take a cancer cell and make it sort of behave better. In other words, we can live with some little bugs and flaws, but we don't want it to be a sort of rampant breakdown.

Don't ask me how we might do that in practice, but that's the vision I have, that in the longer term we will reboot in that manner. But in the shorter term, I think we need to get away from the mindset people are justifiably scared of cancer. And if they're diagnosed with cancer, they want it annihilated. And many of the treatments bring the cancer patient to death's door. And people think it's a price they're prepared to pay just to get rid of this horrid stuff.

And they want every cancer cell destroyed you know, destroyed because they feel it's like an invader. But if we can get to the point where we can say, look, we can manage the cancer, we get to treat it, but not annihilate it and turn it into a chronic disease. And you'll be living with the cancer, as we're all living with cancer anyway. And the point is, the body is very good at containing cancer. It has all sorts of things like immune surveillance and in the microenvironment of cancer cells, various chemical signals and things that will normally keep cancer in check. People present with clinical symptoms when some of those systems break down. But if we could say, well, we want to restore the body's own way of containing the cancer, we can live with it. And so if you say to somebody, and this is a very common scenario,

you might be diagnosed with a primary tumor, and you might have surgery to remove that tumor, and you'll probably be told that there's a 50-50 chance or some number that the cancer will come back in five years or 10 years or something like that. And that's the depressing truth. If you could say, well, our cancer management strategy is such that there's a 50% chance it will come back in 50 years, then think most of us would feel well i've got other things to worry about on the health front so we turn cancer into a chronic disease that we manage much like we do say with diabetes you live with it you make the best of it you don't try and annihilate it but that mindset it means a re-education of the public into thinking that cancer isn't something that you've just got to go in with all guns blazing and try to annihilate.

It's often counterproductive. The cancer bites back even more ferociously than before. And the treatment, as you said, is sometimes worse than… Yes. worse than... Yes. And in fact, as people get older, they'll often be denied treatment because their body simply isn't resilient enough to withstand the effects of the treatment. Let's turn to quantum mechanics. Right. A happier subject, I think. Yes, I hope so. Obviously, something, its role in living systems that fascinates you, as it has so many, Schrodinger among them. To what degree do you

think we are quantum mechanical creatures? So it's rather fascinating that the subject that is now known as quantum biology has sort of bubbled up over the last 10 or 20 years. I've run a few workshops at the Beyond Center on quantum biology and I sit very firmly on the fence. It's undeniable that here and there, life exploits quantum effects. And why wouldn't it? If it gives living systems some little advantage, 5% here, 10% there, it will be selected for. What we'd all like to know is, are these just little quirks

or are they tips of a quantum mechanical iceberg? In other words, is it the case that fundamentally quantum phenomena underpin this magic of life? So does the magic of quantum mechanics explain the magic of life? I've yet to be convinced myself, but I try to keep an open mind. And some people will say, well, of course, quantum mechanics explains life, it explains chemistry. But that's not what we're talking about. When people refer to quantum biology, they normally mean some of these weird quantum effects like tunneling or entanglement,

where two particles a long way apart seem to be communicating with each other in some magical way. Spooky action in the distance. Yes, as Einstein called it, yeah. And so there are these various, as it were, non-trivial quantum effects. And again, it does seem, I'm fairly convinced, that here and there life is making use of them. But I suspect there's a lot more to be discovered. The trouble is that, well, there are two problems.

One is the experimental one, that as we've discussed, life is very complex. And most of our understanding of quantum physics is based on simple systems, atoms and simple molecules and photons and things like that. So teasing out the quantum goings on in this complex environment is very difficult. The other thing is that living organisms are warm and wet, very noisy in the thermodynamic sense. There's molecules banging around, lots of complicating factors that is the opposite of what you need to look at pure quantum effects. So if you go to a lab and you're interested in testing the foundations of quantum mechanics, it's full of pipes and pumps and things are done at a very low temperature to cut out this

thermal noise where you really see the pure quantum effects like superconductivity and so on is at very low temperatures. At room temperature or blood temperature, then it's very hard to see how quantum effects are really going to matter. But quantum mechanics has sprung surprises before. And there's things like high temperature superconductors that nobody expected. Who knows what might be going on inside living organisms? Isn't one of those surprises that some believe they have already found evidence for, the quantum contribution to photosynthesis? Yes, this is one of the examples that seems pretty clear-cut now, though there are, of course, some skeptics. You might think, well, of course, photosynthesis is a quantum effect.

It's photons. But that's not the sense in which that we discuss it. What happens is that in photosynthesis is that these photons are captured by a complex of molecules. And their job, the energy that they bring is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And then that's part of what gives the plant energy and it can make biomass that way. But the chemical reaction center is over here and the light harvesting center is over there. And it's a little bit like having a factory that makes stuff and you've got solar panels powering it, but the solar panels are in the next town and you've got to get the energy from one town to another. That's the case

with photosynthesis. That energy has to be transported and you don't want to lose any on the way and life seems to have evolved a very very clever way of doing that quantum coherently is the technical term and what that really means if people know anything at all about quantum mechanics they'll know this thing called wave-particle duality. An electron can sometimes behave like a particle, sometimes like a wave. Same thing with a photon. Is it a wave? Is it a particle?

Well, it's sort of both, and it depends on the circumstances. What is happening in this energy transport is the wave-like nature of the energy is manifested as it makes its way through a complex of molecules. And waves have this well-known property of interference. If you get a peak of one wave with a trough of another, they cancel each other out. If they arrive peak to peak, they amplify.

Those sorts of effects can, and in this case I think do, Those sorts of effects can, and in this case I think do, lead to a speed up of the increase in efficiency of the way the energy is transported to the reaction center. And this has been studied in quite some detail with laser pulses and so on. And in particular the work of Graham Fleming in Berkeley blazed a trail in this area. And it's one of several examples that have been studied where quantum mechanics really does seem to make a difference in biology. What about the speculation, which also goes pretty far back, that quantum effects, quantum mechanics, may help us understand or may explain how the brain achieves what it does?

There's always been this speculation that quantum mechanics and consciousness somehow connect up. And the reasons for that is very profound and would take us a long time to go into them in detail. But it is, in essence, that quantum mechanics describes a world that is uncertain and indeterministic and fuzzy. Down at the atomic level, you can fire an electron at an atom and it may bounce to the left, and you do an identical experiment tomorrow and it bounces to the right. You can't say in advance what it's going to do. So there's an indeterminism, and the fuzziness means that you can't pin down all of the things the electron is doing at any one time, or any other particle.

So there's a sort of ghostliness to the quantum world down at the atomic level, but there's no ghostliness in everyday life. When we make observations, if you look, you want to determine where is an electron, you can do an experiment, and it's there. It's an electron at a place. Or you can do some other experiment and you find that an electron is moving in a certain way. You can't do these experiments together. But whatever you, the observer, decide to measure, you get a definite result. So somehow,

between the fuzzy ghostly world of atoms and molecules and the concrete everyday world of human beings, the fuzziness has congealed or concretized into a definite reality. So it's as if there are an infinite number of parallel possible realities at the atomic level, but only one reality in daily life. And some people have thought, well, therefore the act of observation, the entry into the consciousness of the individual, is doing something important at the quantum level. The consciousness is somehow concretizing the fuzzy world of atomic physics. So most famously, Eugene Wigner, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, suggested that. Very, very few of my colleagues will be prepared to go along with that.

But they would all acknowledge that when it comes to consciousness, either quantum mechanics will explain consciousness or it won't. And if it doesn't, then there's something new going on in the brain. Some people have tried to come at it from the other direction to say, well, are there quantum effects in the brain, a bit like we described for photosynthesis? Is something like that going on inside the brain down at the level of large molecules. Most famously, Roger Penrose, the Oxford mathematician,

suggested many years ago, and his collaboration with Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona, has been to determine whether there are non-trivial quantum effects taking place in the little tubules inside cells. And that in the brain, there's some quantum goings on that explain consciousness. I'd say I'm very skeptical personally.

But the great thing about being a scientist is you can be both skeptical and open minded at the same time. And good scientists should always be there. We should always listen to what our colleagues have to say. And if we think, well, I'm still not convinced, but, you know, keep up the good work, that's fine. And that's the attitude I take. Hear, hear. You do talk about, and maybe it's the overarching principle of this portion of the book, that as we look for quantum effects, how life might use quantum theory, you say, well, why wouldn't it? It's so effective. Yes. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, that if life spots it gains a 5% edge or 10% edge,

of course, that will be selected for. So we come back to the question, is quantum biology simply sophisticated life discovering some interesting physics on the way? Or was quantum mechanics right there at the outset? In other words, was it the midwife of life right back at the beginning? Well, because we have no idea how non-life turned into life, as I keep stressing ad nauseum, life turned into life, as I keep stressing ad nauseum, it's impossible to know whether a quantum pathway from non-life to life might be the explanation. There's some attraction in thinking that, because one of the things quantum mechanics can do is explore many possible pathways simultaneously.

And so I mentioned that an electron might bounce to the left or it might bounce to the right. The way we like to describe that mathematically is that there are two possible worlds or pathways for the electron. In practice, there'll be an infinite number. And that all else being equal, if you don't perform any measurements, all of these pathways are present together and somehow contributing to the final answer. together and somehow contributing to the final answer. And so could it be that there is some quantum exploration of pathways to life from non-life? I don't know. It's very hand-wavy, and it sort of makes it look like that somehow quantum mechanics knows where it's going. It's

trying to invent life. We don't want to introduce anything quite so blatant or so goal-oriented as that. But looking at chemical pathways quantum mechanically can certainly change the numbers that come out. And it is a numbers game. The question we'd like to know is, given a mishmash of chemicals, what is the probability that something living will emerge? probability that something living will emerge. And if that probability is enhanced by a factor of, you know, a thousand or a million or a trillion or something like that, because of quantum effects, well, it may change our attitude to how likely this is. It certainly is intriguing. One of the many moments in the book that left me speechless was when you talked about these organisms, extremophiles, as we have come to call them,

who live near these vents at the bottom of the ocean, that perform photosynthesis, and that they are amazingly efficient, that there are some of these photosynthetic structures that can actually get benefit from a single photon. Right, right. So it looks like photosynthesis, which, as I've described, and we think of plants, is exploiting these quantum effects.

But we have to look at the history of photosynthesis. It didn't start with plants. It started deep down in the deep ocean volcanic vents billions of years ago. And so life probably began in that setting. And there isn't much light down there.

In fact, there is no light from the sun penetrates to those sorts of depths, talking kilometers. But there will be some infrared radiation from these hot surfaces and so on. Photosynthesis almost certainly first evolved. That is, when I say photosynthesis, I mean using the energy of photons to make biomass, which is what it amounts to. But the mechanism, my original mechanism, was probably very different. And of course, we can speculate that it was at that stage that life discovered a quantum advantage in that deep, dark hellhole, as we might think of it now, discovered that quantum mechanics could buy some advantage.

And in biology, you don't need much advantage for it to become selected for. And that then once you have the basis of a mechanism, turning photons into biomass in some way, or using it as an energy source for converting chemicals into biomass in some way, or using it as an energy source for converting chemicals into biomass, once you've got that, then that basic principle can then spread to life on the surface, as clearly it has, without having to rediscover it all over again. So a lot of these things go back a long, long way in time.

We can date the genes. We can look at the genes that drive this and get some idea of when these effects evolved. This is a very new field. It's called phylostratigraphy. It means we can take extant genes and ask something about these recently evolved genes, ancient genes, and we always have the impression

that anything that is truly fundamental to the way life does business must be very ancient. You build the foundations before you build the rest of the house. And this is a burgeoning field of phyloestratigraphy, and it's very important for cancer research as well as things like photosynthesis. Also an area that you explore in the book. I don't mean to imply that photosynthesis may have been around at the origin of life on Earth. But I do wonder what all of this may say to you about how we should be looking for the origin of life, not just here, but elsewhere. Of course, we have no certainty that life on Earth began on Earth.

It may have begun on Mars, for example, and come to Earth in impact ejecta. We know Earth and Mars trade rocks on a regular basis, and organisms cocooned in those rocks can certainly make the journey and be viable at the other end. So Mars cooled quicker, was ready for life sooner, so it may have got going there and come here at a later stage. But, of course, it doesn't explain. That's just exporting the question.

Yes, it doesn't explain how non-life turns into life. We actually don't know the setting. There are a few favorites out there. Some people like the deep ocean volcanic vent setting. Some people prefer ponds on the surface that go through cycles of wet and dry. Some people like droplets in the air. Some people want to take it off the planet and say, put it in comets. Who knows? We absolutely don't know, because we don't know what the process was. As we were discussing earlier, it might have been the quantum mechanics played a really important role. But we're very far from establishing that. And experiments in the lab, of which this university was a pioneer, blazed a trail of can you cook up life in the lab by mixing stuff up that we think represents the early Earth and sparking electricity through it to see what will happen. You're talking about the Miller-Urey experiment.

The famous Miller-Urey experiment. Stanley Miller was here. That gives you some simple building blocks. And there's a whole tradition of chemists doing that, of trying to cook up more and more complex molecules. But the gulf between these sorts of building block molecules and the simplest living things, like Craig Venter's Mycoplasma Laboratorium, as a slimmed-down organism. But it's still immensely complex compared to a few of these building blocks.

And that gulf is huge. And as I've been at pains to point out, I think it's focusing on the wrong problem. I think that life, it's not the stuff of which it's made. It's the software. It's the information processing. And that's where the transition from non-life to life, that's the one we have to understand. How do molecules write code, computer code, to put it bluntly? It's like cells are really just, in many ways, like computers.

They store information, they process it, and they propagate it. And it's in code. It's encrypted. process it and they propagate it. And it's in code. It's encrypted. The genetic code is an encryption. It's one of countless possible mathematical codes that could be used. All known life uses the same code. How did that code come to exist in the first place? How did these stupid molecules write anything as clever as the genetic code? We don't know. But that's a software problem, not a hardware problem. We could stop there. but I must take you just a bit deeper into speculation and discuss life as we don't know it. For example, if there is some kind of or some level of quantum mechanical reliance by life, and if quantum mechanical processes don't like heat, don't like the chaos that heat brings, what about someplace like Titan, the moon of Saturn, or even colder places, Pluto, which may have liquid water someplace, but is a very cold environment. Ignore liquid water because I did say life that is not like us.

Does this get your mind working at all? Probably the craziest paper I ever published, which was in the journal Nature about 15 years ago, was on a quantum origin of life. And I wanted to go even colder, so I picked an interstellar grain that might be rather close to the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, about three degrees above absolute zero. If you want to go cold, that's a pretty

good place to do it. And conjectured, by analogy with a computer again, when you think about a computer, the microchip is incredibly fast at processing information. It really turns over at an enormous speed. But you turn off the power and you lose that information. So what do computers do? Well, they store it on what used to be a hard drive, used to be literally a spinning disk. So let's go with that analogy. Big, clunky, slow slow but very robust the information is

stored there so i had this idea that quantum life if it could be based on quantum replication variation and selection would be some condensed matter physics system like a spin glass with complexity there but a replicative ability as well. I've no idea about the physics of that. You know, it all sounds impressive. I didn't work it out. But, you know, imagine something that was incredibly fast because it was essentially quantum mechanical information processing. Qubits, rather than bits, to use the jargon.

But hopelessly delicate and unable to spread. But imagine that it backed up that information in the equivalent of a hard disk. And what that hard disk would be is organic molecules, big, clunky, slow, but robust things. And then eventually it's as if, you know, the hard disk says to the chip in a computer, I've got enough to make a living on my own goodbye

and goes off and inherits the earth. And so that was the scenario, that the organic backup, slow but reliable, would be the next generation of life. These little grains are probably still doing their thing out there, but we wouldn't know about them because they couldn't live on earth because it's too warm. Seeding the universe. Yes, yes. This is a crazy theory.

But great fun. Well, my feeling is that this is such a problem, this origin of life, that we need to just think outside the box. We need new concepts. So it's not enough to just think, well, we've got a rough idea. You've got this molecule or that molecule, and will it make more of this? And is it more efficient at making that? That's locked into a particular way of thinking, which fine, you know, if people want to do that. But I think I'm sort of bored with that narrative. We just need to think if life is really about software, not hardware, not the stuff. It's about the information patterns. Well, as you know, again, with a computer, you can copy a file from a computer onto a flash drive and then you can send it down optical fiber and so on.

The medium, the instantiation of that information is irrelevant. The pattern transcends that. of that information is irrelevant. The pattern transcends that. And if you think of life as really being about copying patterns of information and not so much about copying the stuff, then we don't need all this complicated replicated machinery. So in life as we know it, you copy the molecules. You make new molecules.

It's like you want to copy a file from your computer. You put it on a flash drive. You wouldn't think, well, let's make another hard drive with, you know, everything on it. I mean, it would just not be the way to do it. So I think trying to think in those terms, or any other terms, we just need new thinking about this extraordinary thing that we call life. My strong impression is that you enjoy thinking about these things, topics like this, even more than the great enjoyment I've gotten out of this conversation or your book. It's true that I enjoy it and I wouldn't write about it

if I didn't think it was enormous fun. Thank you, Paul. This has been delightful. It's my pleasure. Thank you. The book is The Demon in the Machine, How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mysteries of Life by our guest, Paul Davies. It is from the University of Chicago Press, and I could not recommend it more highly. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He is back to tell us about the night sky.

And we'll do some other stuff, like in the new contest, give away that copy of Paul Davies' book, The Demon in the Machine. Planet Party time again. The evening in the west, Venus dominating, looking like a super bright star. like a super bright star. And then on the 27th of February, the moon, the very crescent-y moon, will join Venus in the evening west. And then in the pre-dawn east, we've got Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Got Mars to the upper right looking reddish, Jupiter much brighter to the lower left, and then if you have a clear view to the horizon, you can pick up Saturn down below. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1965 that Ranger 8 impacted the moon on purpose, taking pictures and transmitting them back before it did that.

We'll come back to Ranger. And then 1994, the Clementine spacecraft entered lunar orbit. I don't want to ruin any trivia questions, but was that the first Ranger to be successful? I know that there were a whole bunch that weren't. Gosh, funny you'd ask. That makes this less of a random space fact. The Ranger program was a bunch of robotic spacecraft that were designed to get the highest resolution at the time pictures of the lunar surface as they were planning for landing humans. And they were impactors, so they would just take pictures and transmit as they were headed down to crash. And indeed, the first six failed. According to the Internet, the program was called Shootin' Hope for a while.

That's embarrassing. And then something changed, and JPL succeeded with Ranger 7, which successfully returned images in July 1964. And then there were a couple more successful missions as well. And they gave us close-up views of the moon as they slammed in, before they slammed into the moon. I was a very young kid, and I remember watching the live coverage. Since the pictures had to come back live, I mean, you know, wasn't going to be able to transmit them later. It was absolutely fascinating. And it was such a big deal at the time. I still remember it with a lot of excitement.

Cool. Well, then you will enjoy our trivia contest as well. But first, let's talk about the previous trivia contest, which is always interesting. I'm sure lots of people had it on the tip of their tongue when I asked, what was Lyman Spitzer's middle name for whom the Spitzer Space Telescope was named? How'd we do, Matt? First, this comment about the Spitzer Space Telescope, which, of course, we just talked to those leaders of that great grand observatory, that great observatory in space, which has now been decommissioned. Benjamin Middis down under Australia. He said, it's always sad to hear that space hardware has been decommissioned, but there is always something new and exciting to look forward to. Congratulations to all the team involved and what amazing work they produced.

That's for sure. What an amazing mission with so many great, great results. Here's the answer in the form of our submission from the poet laureate Dave Fairchild in Kansas, who also mentioned what a guy Spitzer was. I'll have more about that. Maybe you will too. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale. Lyman Spitzer Sr. had a son who shared his name, born in 1914, who would rise to great acclaim. Telescopes and asteroids, his moniker would share, although you'll rarely see the strong part mentioned anywhere. Indeed, strong. Lyman Strong Spitzer Jr. Then congratulations go to first-time winner, long-time listener, Joel Lecter in Quebec. You have won yourself a copy of Spitzer Project scientist Michael Werner's new book,

More Things in the Heavens, How Infrared Astronomy is Expanding Our View of the Universe, and a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Yay! Mark Smith in San Diego, he said he was hoping that the middle name would be alpha Lyman, alpha astronomy joke. Yeah. Astronomers around the world are rolling on the floor right now. Just, just like Bruce. He says, unfortunately, there it is. I knew it.

Darren Ritchie in Washington State, fascinated to discover that among many other things he invented, the stellarator, now enjoying new popularity in fusion research. That was back in the 50s. I also discovered that he helped develop sonar. Darren went on to say he made the first ascent of Mount Thor in Arctic Canada, which features Earth's tallest vertical cliff face. What a life. Wow. Daniel Huckabee in Nevada, Planetary Society member and avid listener here, he says, not only was the Spitzer Space Telescope named after him, he actually came up with the idea to put telescopes in space. Now, that is a strong idea.

And that's true. I read up on this too. He wrote about the advantages of a space telescope in 1946. He later oversaw the creation of OAO, or Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 3, the first one that really worked well, apparently. With that in mind, this closing poem from Eugene Lewin in Washington State. With that in mind, this closing poem from Eugene Lewin in Washington State.

With foresight and supportive peers, developed OAO in the early years, leading to the four great observatories, Chandra Compton and the first, HST, the fourth with vision just as long, named for Professor Spitzer, Lyman Strong. I want to get that as a wristband limonstrong but the only way to really see it is to look in the infrared it's even better i love it i love it an infrared one we'll talk to our contacts about that now we're ready to go on to your your what ranger related new question. Ranger related new question. What ranger mission imaged Mari Tranquillidadis or the sea of tranquility, the place that of course later would be the first place humans stepped onto

Mars or the moon. Take your pick. What ranger mission image Mari Tranquillidatus, or however you pronounce it, I'm sorry to all the Latins in the crowd, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Got till the 26th. That's February 26th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this one. And if you win, you will get a copy of Paul Davies' The Demon in the Machine,

How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life. And a Planetary Society rubber. I didn't do that very well. Rubber asteroid. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, think about your favorite word that begins with the letter X. Shouldn't take long, although if you've got other languages, maybe. Thank you. Good night. If I had a xylophone, I would use it like the old NBC

tones. I would have a series of tones like that for planetary radio. So I'm going to say xylophone. Cool. We should get you a xylophone. It only needs three. It only needs three notes. It'll be cheaper that way. He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its well-informed members. Will you join us at planetary.org slash membership?

Mark Hilverd is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at ASPR.