Will Quantum Physics Break Biochemistry?
Chemistry’s teachings are becoming obsolete when it comes to making advancements in the field of biology, as chemical theories consistently miss when explaining complicated biological functions, could this all be because we look at matter itself all wrong?
The Issue Stems from Chemistry
Biochemistry has its backing in explaining the chemical reactions behind biological process, and it is used for much of modern day medicine as well as creating technology that mimics nature’s processes. How could such a science be so flawed that it could be better explained by another science boils down completely to the makeup of the outdated concepts of chemistry that govern biochemistry.
It’s simple, think to learning about oxidation states in back in chemistry class, or even if you didn’t; is there any explanation for why multivalent metals have multiple oxidation states that doesn’t involve quantum physics? The whole idea of orbitals that fill in opposing to the Bohr-Rutherford model stems from quantum mechanics and deeply relies on the standard model of particle physics, but it answers the question [1]. The thing is that chemistry is very limited in what it can explain before branching off into quantum physics, and advancements in biochemistry could be starting to hit the roadblock that is quantum physics [2].
How is Quantum Theory More Descriptive
Quantum theory breaks down atomic theory into forces and elementary particles. Protons and neutrons are made of 3 quarks held together by gluons which administer the nuclear strong force, and electrons are leptons that are attracted to positivity through photon’s enforcement of electromagnetism [3], etc. Almost all trends observed by chemistry can be explained easily by quantum interactions [4] between a lepton or a quark and the four forces (which are enacted through a boson of some kind).
It’s simpler, in a way, than considering every chemical interaction that we have observed so far when explaining the nature of matter, for example instead of a new scientist memorizing every multivalent element to consider how many electrons could be moved in a reaction, they could just memorize the order in which the electron orbitals actually fill for all elements (1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 4s, 3d, 4p, 5s, 4d, 5p…) to calculate whether an element will have multiple oxidation states or not [5]. Obviously that is not something that every scientist would have to do to explain the nature of a reaction, but for more complicated reactions that start to involve quantum forces it is something that is required to know [6], ie. utilizing electronegativity, or ionization energy.
Why Don’t we Use Quantum Theory Over Chemistry yet?
Short answer: it’s hard
Chemistry is good because it works. It has explained the nature of the matter around us pretty well for the past 400 years, without the need to go any deeper. But the past 60 years has opened up a whole wormhole of quantum theory for physics, because physics had it a wall [7]. It’s almost time for chemistry and biology to take those next steps too. We haven’t used quantum theory before because we haven’t needed to, but the stagnation of the impact that biochemistry has on humanity is starting to indicate a roadblock [8].
What Does any of this Have to do With Biochemistry?
After reading about the long and complicated nuances between atomic and quantum theory, most readers should be wondering “What does this even have to do with biochemistry?”, and that's understandable because the answer isn’t immediately obvious, and even more unclear is “how will this ‘break’ biochemistry?”.
The thing is that our entire concept of molecular interactions of biological systems relies on positioning of compounds that follows the Richardson positioning system [9]. The Richardson positioning system is what causes proteins to be visualized like a twirled up ribbon, but it turns out that proteins, and enzymes lipids etc., don’t look or interact with compounds exactly like Richardson positioning stipulates because of quantum indistinguishability [10]. Yes, quantum physics will throw a wrench in the side of decades of institutionalized biochemistry research. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle pretty much says that you can’t distinguish where a particle is in spacetime and what it is at the same time; you can only distinguish one factor exactly [11].
This matters immensely because complicated reactions relating to biological process require knowledge of a bit of both factors, and biochemistry Richardson system has no conceptualization of such a principal [12]. At this point we are really just measuring the complicated trends in biochemistry with no insight or explanation to how it really happened, and that matters [13]. Pharmaceutical trials and grooming products that rely on biochemistry to test if the product is safe or not are notoriously expensive compared to other lab trials, and inconsistent. The whole reason that the pharmaceutical industry is so messed up could boil down to the fact they look at drug-cell interactions completely wrong [14].
How Quantum Theory Takes Over
Quantum physics takes atomic theory a step further than chemistry ever could, and that starts to matter when it comes to predicting things like protein-phospholipid bilayer interactions. The replacement of Richardson positioning will need to happen to explain the completely new forces start coming into play that would “mess things up” in a classical physicist’s prediction of the reality of biochemical reactions [15]. Things like the Casimir effect and the quantum weak force widely go unacknowledged when it comes to modeling ‘biochemical’ reactions. The forces unconsidered by chemistry might be able to explain some gaps in our knowledge; like whether passive diffusion through eukaryotic cell membranes actually happens or not, or how lipids from non-harmful foods and pollins slip into mast cells to trigger t-cell immune responses [16]. Changes will soon have to be made to make up for these lapses in knowledge, because the trends are getting described by a whole other field of science.
More Research Needed
A few interesting examples were given earlier that could have anomalies explained by quantum physics, but the list is truly exhaustive. Many biology based problems could end up being quantum related, and I am fascinated by it. From how diatom protists synthesize silica, to how cyanobacteria ‘fix’ methane, observing and understanding how evolution around us has allowed other organisms to perform such miracles can allow us to attempt to do it ourselves.
I can’t say definitively that biochemistry as a whole should just be thrown out the window going forward, but I do think that it should start to take a backseat to quantum biology. If you are at all interested in quantum physics I suggest looking into the sources that I linked in the article as annotations along with the concept that is described by them. If you want a more indepth dive on how we can move past chemistry’s role in biology, I have a startup based around quantum phenomena paired with machine learning to replace pharmaceutical trials at www.defuselabs.com, and I have a new project based around using the casimir effect to make our process of gene editing as good as phages to fix anaphylactic reactions at https://medium.com/p/9e6737f5/edit.
