The Light of Life
The biology of light is just as regulated as the biology of molecules
The Light of Life - v2
Video version here
Introduction
In the early 1920s, Alexander Gurwitsch in Russia was experimentally exploring the idea that all life emits and is embedded in a morphogenic field. At one point, he took two onions out of the ground, careful to preserve their roots. The tip of the root has the highest rate of mitosis - the cells are dividing fastest at the tip. He pointed the tip of one root at the middle section of the second root. The cells in that middle section of the second root then started to divide much faster. He further experimented with blocking the effect, and found that if he put a barrier between the two, he could stop the effect if the barrier blocked ultraviolet wavelengths of light. Here was the first modern experiment showing that living cells emit light, and that this light can directly cause changes in the behavior of other cells.
Gurwitsch A. G. (1923). Die natur des spezifischen erregers der zellteilung. Arch. Mikrosk. Anat. Und. Entw. Mech. 100, 11–40.
Today you can verify that your eyes emit light by purchasing a Hamatsu photomultiplier and going into a completely dark room and pointing the photomultiplier at your eye. Living systems emit light, from ultraviolet to very low frequency radio waves. Different tissues emit different wavelengths, at different times, and at varying intensities.
Why is this not more obvious? I would argue that it is, since we have all noticed, “The light in someone’s eyes”, or said things like, “She has a glow about her”, or, “You were simply radiant.” If we would all trust our own experience more, then science could progress much faster. The amount of light given off by creatures varies quite a bit, from a few photons per second to tens of thousands. That places the intensity ]in the range of walking in a dense forest at night, where things are “really dark”, but somehow plenty of nocturnal animals do just fine.
From https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343884128_Biophotons_and_visual_phenomena
Examples
What is this bio-light doing? Here are a few examples.
Over the winter, a seed will not emit any light. As the rain falls, and the temperatures rise, in the quiet darkness of the soil, the seeds start emitting light, green light, up to 10,000 photons per second.
Another example: Put someone in a dark room, shave off a bit of the hair on their scalp, and place a Hamatsu photo-detector against the area of the visual cortex. Take a baseline reading. Ask the person to imagine a bright light. The photon count immediately shoots up. Your brain gives off more light when you imagine light.
The light emissions from the entire human body were recorded periodically over the course of a year. The entire body brightens in the summer, and is darkest in the winter. Within a single day the body brightens as the Sun goes to its zenith, then the body gradually dims as the day moves to night. The light emitted from the center of the body stays the most constant, while the hands and head show the most variation. The colors emitted are centered around green, but go to blue and yellow, but the light from the center of the palms is shifted slightly more to the blue.
Our blood is constantly emitting light. Blood that had a higher immune response, in this case carrying more neutrophils, had a measurably higher photon count. To our alert bio-medical viewers, this is probably the best area to look for new diagnostic techniques, as you can be absolutely certain that the complex rainbow of colors given off by our blood perfectly reflects the ever-changing physical and emotional state of our organism.
Diving into individual cells, biophotons travel from mitochondria through microtubules. When I was in graduate school it was just observed that microtubules were used by cells as highways to actively transport materials to where they are needed in the cell. And now we know that those tubules are also carrying light. We have also found that single neurons act as waveguides for visible light photons - that is, neurons not only behave as electrical wires, but also act like fiber optic cables. Light and electricity are really two sides of the same coin, so we probably should have seen that one coming. In the old picture, any “light” present in biological systems was just the random thermal energies. And yes, there is plenty of that. But now we see that specific biological processes are initiated by specific frequencies of light, which are emitted at specific times and places. The biology of light is just as regulated as the biology of molecules.
We are down to the final two. My runner up favorite is based upon the fact that when you are in a bright light, your brain emits more photons. Take two people, place them in the same room, along with an antenna which emits a weak oscillating magnetic field. Person #1 stays in the 1st room, while person #2 goes to a second room, which is completely dark. Shine a bright light on the first person. The second person’s brain will immediately emit more biophotons. This only worked if the two people first shared the experience of being in the same oscillating magnetic field. I read this paper 6 months ago and am still wondering what it means.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21396353/
Discussion
Before looking at my favorite example, let us discuss things a little.
Life emits light. In some cases we see that the light is doing specific work, such as initiating mitosis. If humans were nocturnal creatures this would all be obvious, as the luminosities are roughly that of a forest on a moonless night. We have light shooting out of our eyes, the ground below us is radiant with the ultraviolet light of root mitosis.
For those with a classical bent, you might be saying, Plato was right, once again! Plato said that in human vision, light goes out from our eyes, and blends with the light coming from objects, and the combination results in what we see. Now we have proof that our eyes emit light. To a physicist this was always an obvious possibility, since all receivers are also transmitters. A radio antenna can send a signal, or receive the same signal. It has to work both ways. The rhodopsin molecules in the retinal cells can absorb visible light, therefore they must also be able to emit the same visible light. Why might the light coming from our eyes blend with the light coming in? To answer this we can look at how the ears work. Decades ago it was found that our ears emit sound. This was shelved as an interesting oddity until someone wondered if there might not be some purpose to it. They found that the ears emit sound for the purpose of actively producing signal canceling and signal enhancement. Ever wonder how in a crowded room you are capable of focusing in on one conversation, even someone else’s conversation several feet away? It’s the same principle as the noise canceling headphones, but several light years more advanced, as your auditory system somehow knows where is the voice you want to hear, how far away it is, how long it takes the sound to travel the distance between your two ears, and in realtime, as the sounds in the room keep changing, your ear drums emit a sound signal that will reduce everything else, and enhance the particular voice you want to hear. The same is happening with your vision. I have not found that research yet, but it will come along soon enough.
Biochemistry & Photobiology
How is the biology of light different from the biology we learned in school? One hundred years ago people did not so much think of biology as a chemical process. Everyone listening to this lecture was educated inside the biochemistry paradigm - we were taught that biology is ONLY a chemical process.
What do we mean by BIOCHEMISTRY? Take the example of a cell needing to build out some new bits of its machinery, such as a new ribosome. Ribosomes are the primary machinery that cells use to build all the other proteins the cell needs. This requires raw material, enzymes and an energy source. Imagine the new ribosome is almost completed, and just a final bit needs to be attached. The final required bit of protein is there, I guess just hanging around. The precise enzyme needed for just this final attachment also just happens to be there. And the ATP molecule is also hanging around. Then they all come together, energy is released from the ATP molecule, travels through the enzyme, and the final bit of the ribosome is added. Biochemistry is great because biochemists have worked out all the players in this construction story, and a thousand others, and have measured the amount of energy needed in each case.
Now let us retell the story adding light and electricity. What do we mean by “energy is released from the ATP”? Electron orbits are broken, rearranged. This is a change in electric currents. This change in electric currents emits light, just as the radio antenna emits the light as the electric current is changed. This bit of light emitted by the ATP travels through the optical conductor called “enzyme” and is used to rearrange electric currents on the almost finished ribosome. Think arc welding. These changes would look like sparks, and rippling rainbows, if we had the eyes to see it. You cannot have chemical changes without light. When electric currents change, light is produced. When light is absorbed, electric currents change. Light and electric currents are two sides of the same coin. They are the energy and matter corresponding to each other.
Life as Worlds within Worlds
To better understand Organic Life, we need to see it as a hierarchy of worlds within worlds. A piece of light is not the same as a molecule. A molecule is not the same as a cell. A cell is not the same as a human body. These are all worlds of vastly different sizes and properties. Yet all these worlds interpenetrate one another, and influence each other. We could not have organic life without cells, or without chemicals, or without light and electricity. Nor could cells live without ecosystems, and the whole Earth, and the Sun. This hierarchy holds together because all the levels communicate, and exchange energy and information.
Starting with the onion, let’s step our way down the ladder:
An Onion is living
-> Root is growing
-> Cells are dividing
-> Loads of chemical changes
-> Changes in electric currents
-> UV light emitted
When this UV light is absorbed by a second root, this initiates the whole process in reverse, causing rapidly changing electric currents, needed for rapid chemical rearrangements, needed for rapid cell division, and the root of the second onion begins to grow. Root cells are both transmitters and receivers of everything roots are capable of doing.
In general, if there is a problem at any one level, it affects all the levels. If something goes wrong with a molecular process in my cells, I experience that as ill-health. The molecular world makes itself known to the person.
Or, the whole person might engage in unhealthy behavior, such as persistent negative thoughts or useless fears, which will inevitably "trickle down" to cause disordered molecular activity in some cells.
With this picture of interconnection up and down the ladder, we now widen our view, and look further up the scale. If a large number people are engaged in unhealthy activity, this must work its way up to cause ill-health in whatever larger groupings exists, be they families, or countries, or even all of life on Earth taken all together. Going the other way, if we can imagine it, if there were something gone wrong at a planetary level, then this must find its way down to humanity, not necessarily to make each person sick, but certainly cause changing trends of illness that appear and disappear across the globe.
Our ladder now stretches from the entire Earth down to individual photons - and we are ready for my #1 favorite experiment, involving DNA. The lab of Luc Montagnier was studying the radio frequencies emitted by DNA. In the last of a series of truly boggling experiments, they placed a string of DNA into a vial of water and stimulated the vial with various radio frequencies. Then filter out all the DNA. This leaves just water, but the water is now emitting radio frequencies, which it somehow got from the DNA. Place an antenna around the vial of water, and send that radio signal to a second lab several miles away. In this other lab, you have a second test tube that contains water and all the individual building blocks of DNA. Broadcast our signal into this second vial. In a few hours the original DNA strand will be constructed in the second vial. Sounds like magic, and I guess it is, but it is also experimental data. Water can hold the RF signal which can be used to rebuild the DNA sequence from raw materials. I would hope that entire new research labs would be set up to further explore these results. Luc Montagnier has many admirers and many enemies, as often happens with people who achieve a great deal in life. Shortly before his death last year he had the distinction of being “canceled” for daring to point out some obvious problems with a novel medical treatment that was being rolled out around the world. Hence it is possible that anything connected with him will be erased from future history.
The work is summarized in this video
The original paper here
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230937823_DNA_waves_and_water
What frequencies worked best in this experiment? The results were clearest when the initial strand was energized with 7, 14, and 28 Hz. Of course these are the resonance frequencies of the entire electrical body of the Earth - the Schumann resonances. That is worth saying a second time. The entire electrical body of the Earth vibrates loudest at 7, 14, 28 Hz. These are the same frequencies that allowed DNA in the experiment to best convey its information through water to rebuild itself. It is absurd to think this is an accident. This obvious connection between the electrical body of the Earth and the DNA in each of us makes me quiet, like I sometimes get quiet in church, or in an overwhelmingly beautiful landscape. At this point poetry meets experimental science. The bridge between the two seems long, but is also undeniable. Antennas work both ways: the entire electrical body of the Earth is both the sender and receiver of all the vibrations in all the DNA in all living creatures over all the eons that have unfolded within Her. Inside you are a trillion antennas that are both the senders and receivers of all the Love and Wisdom contained in the long body of our Mother Earth.
This would be enough, but we are not done yet. In simple physics, the length of an antenna is comparable to the size of the waves it absorbs and emits. The AM radio antenna on your car is 1/4 the size of the AM radio waves being sent out from the radio stations. Since we have already verified experimentally that our DNA is an antenna that both absorbs and emits information, we might ask, What is the length of our DNA, and is there any station broadcasting that wavelength? The DNA in a single one of your cells unrolls to roughly your own height. That is a notable connection. An organism the size of a person needs an antenna roughly its own size to adequately send and receive all the information required for an entire life from conception to death. But what about the combined length of all the DNA in all your cells? That combined length is the size of our entire solar system. We have within us antennas whose combined length happens to be the right size to resonate with the entire body of the Sun, the planets, all the comets, even out to the heliopause.
Who could believe such a thing? How could there be a connection with the life of a person and the entire solar system? Yet the connection must be there, because the ladder is unbroken. Whether or not any one of us can knowingly receive these signals, or is capable of intentionally broadcasting up to the whole solar system is a good question. I dare say it is a very important question. Thank You.
Further thoughts
If humans were ever so stupid as to muck with the large-scale electrical body of the Earth, then they we would also be stupid enough to conduct large scale experiments mucking with the genetics of humans, animals, and plants. To help us out of such stupidity we certainly need a new generation of scientists who embrace the idea of worlds within worlds, and who are not scandalized by the fact that the entire Earth resonates at the same frequencies as the DNA in every cell of their body.
We see that light in biological systems can control processes, and send information. In the 1923 onion root experiment, the UV light emitted by the first root initiated mitosis in the second root. The second root received the signal to begin cell division. We usually think of the soil as a dark place. It is fun to realize that in the spring time, with all the new roots, the ground under our feet is radiant with ultraviolet light.
Wonderful work! It might be that "progress" in science won't be based on NEW discoveries, but rather, based on rediscovering older ideas that were too advanced for their time, or suppressed for some reason. Thanks for diving down these rabbit holes!!
I enjoyed your video so much yesterday. I’ve had the intuitive thought that life emits light just outside of the visible spectrum, but this is only because that light is meant for other purposes. Not long ago a video was published of the emission of photons when an ovule is fertilized. Being light another manifestation of electromagnetism, we get confirmation after confirmation the the entire universe is driven by electromagnetism. Thanks for making these wonderful and awe inspiring, curiosity picking and thought stimulating videos Michael Clarage!