Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
I speak with world leaders on circadian & quantum biology, metabolic medicine & regenerative farming in search of the most effective ways of optimising health and reversing chronic disease.
Regenerative Health with Max Gulhane, MD
84. Quantum Biology, Mitochondria and Light In Health & Disease | Prof. Geoffrey Guy
Geoffrey Guy is a medical doctor, former Pharmaceutical executive and billionaire philanthropist of the Guy Foundation, aimed at advancing medicine through quantum biology.
This interview is an introduction to quantum biology, quantum biological phenomena in life and the key role of the mitochondrion in health and disease.
The Guy Foundation recently released a report on Spaceflight & human health through a quantum biology lens - see my previous episode for my analysis of that report.
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In this episode of the Regenerative Health Podcast, I interview Professor Jeffrey Guy, medical doctor, former pharmaceutical executive and billionaire philanthropic founder of the Guy Foundation, leading what I believe to be the world's most innovative research in health that of quantum biology. In this interview, amongst a whole range of fascinating topics, we discussed the role of light in life, both endogenously generated light, also known as ultra weak biophoton, and exogenous light in the form of solar photons and their interactions. I believe the light and life story explored through the lenses of quantum and circadian biology, hold the key to understanding and preventing chronic disease and optimizing human health. Hope you enjoy this podcast. Professor Guy, you've got a very interesting story that started with a medical school and detoured through the pharmaceutical industry and has now arrived at this fascinating work with quantum biology, so perhaps you could give us a brief idea of that story.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the briefest idea is I often describe myself as a full-time medical student with a giant size, chemistry says, but effectively. After a few years in medical practice I was training to be an obstetrician in London I decided to take a sabbatical for a year to do some medical research in the pharmaceutical industry and, very fortunately, with a pharmaceutical company in the south of France. It seemed extremely attractive at the time. I had done a degree in pharmacology during my medical training, so that helped me a little bit and I went off to France to work for a drug company called Pierre Farbe.
Speaker 2:I worked for Monsieur Pierre Farbe at the time. He had developed his business on the back of plant medicines but was moving into new chemical entities and my role was to take those first dose in man and then up into proof of concept. And I did that for a few years, came back to the UK and worked for a company that developed control release morphine for terminal pain and other drug delivery products. And having worked for two private pharmaceutical companies at the tender age of about 29 or 30. I thought, well, I'd give it a go myself and started my first pharmaceutical company which was Ethical Holdings, which was a drug delivery business.
Speaker 2:We did that in the mid-80s and in the 80s and 90s. Drug delivery, control release tablets, different dosage forms, skin patches those were very popular in terms of advancing therapeutics and I came out of that company in about 97 and had previously considered which other products would benefit from modern drug delivery and, having worked with plant materials opiates, for example, for pain I'd focused on cannabis and cannabinoids in the early 90s but had given that idea up when the regulators had told me that over their dead body would they allow me to do any development with a cannabis medicine. That had changed by the late 90s. Uh, the courts and the regulators were under pressure from a widespread use in in cases like multiple sclerosis, the arthricities, rheumatoid osteoarthritis, cancer pain, for example, and her majesty's government asked me whether I would address the issue of developing a medicine from cannabis. So I set up GW Pharmaceuticals, gw being my initials and those of the surname of my founding partner, brian Whittle, so Guy and Whittle.
Speaker 2:And to cut a long story short, over 20 years we developed Sativex for multiple sclerosis and then the one that most people know about, which was Epidiolex, which is cannabidiol for treatment of catastrophic epilepsies in children now extended into adults, found ourselves really at the forefront leaders in cannabinoid science uh, having turned it from being a cannabis plant being considered as an illegal plant to a medicine of the future, and I think it was either scientific american I think it was scientific american or nature that described the cannabinoids as the aspirin of the 21st century.
Speaker 2:So we enjoyed very much being able to research this complex area of medicine very complex area indeed.
Speaker 2:But I was always concerned that, being chairman of a NASDAQ company, by that time we were listed on NASDAQ, there was the chance that one day somebody would come along and want to take the company over, and I was concerned about really falling off an intellectual precipice. So my wife and I, in 2018, this was a number of years before we did sell the company we established the Guy Foundation to look at the next generation of interesting research, and I often quote at the beginning of my lectures that Albert Einstein once said that if an idea wasn't at first considered absurd, then it had no chance, and I suppose I consider myself as the purveyor of absurd ideas. The last 40 years opiates into modern use in the hospice and terminal care environment, then making medicines out of cannabinoids. We thought the next step might be to look at something new and something over the horizon again, and that work really came out of some of the work that we were doing trying to identify the mechanisms of action and the pharmacology of the cannabinoids, the pharmacology of the cannabinoids Fantastic.
Speaker 1:So that is quite a pivot from cannabinoid and based medicines and pharmacology into quantum biology. So what was the, I guess, spark that made you look into perhaps from a biochemical to more of a biophysical and biophysics perspective?
Speaker 2:Having spent 40 years researching medicines and doing a large amount of pharmacology, when we were looking for the mode of action of the cannabinoids, it was difficult to pin it down in terms of classical Hillian pharmacology. And the more we looked at it and the fact that the cannabinoids seem to work across a wide range of therapeutic indications and work almost across all types of mechanisms and biological systems, we thought the link was always the bioenergetics, that every process, every mechanism of action required energy. And we likened it to perhaps one arriving home finding that one's remote control for the television doesn't work and the transistor radio doesn't work and your alarm clock doesn't work and you work out, you've actually bought a box of bad batteries. And so we began to focus on cellular bioenergetics and I took the view, oh, probably 15 years ago, that I thought the cannabinoids were working by modulating intracellular bioenergetics and that would then be the balance of energy production and usage, energy dissipation and, of course, inflammation, that fine balance of intracellular energy and inflammatory media. So we began to think about, uh, the cannabinoids working at the level of mitochondria and at cellular bioenergetics.
Speaker 2:Initially we were producing hypotheses that worked on standard or more classical thermodynamics and at the same time my colleague, long-standing colleague, professor alistair nunn, had started to try and image cannabidiol inside mitochondria, and we were using two photon microscopy to do that, where one? Uh bombards the molecule with one photon uh increases excitation state a little and then 20 femtoseconds later you bomb up with a second that excites the molecule and one could image it. And what we found is, as soon as we exposed the cannabidiol to any amounts of light and in certain wavelengths, it fluoresced. And what we realized, of course, is that we were dealing with the, with quite quite a strong chromophore, and that, very quickly uh made us really shift our thinking from classical thermodynamics into quantum uh, quantum science, and it was from that notion that we thought perhaps we ought to look more deeply into the underlying mechanisms of the fundamentals of how cells work and how all cells work, and that led us into quantum biology.
Speaker 1:And that was probably about seven or eight years ago, a couple of years before we started the foundation 2024, and you've had an absolute stellar lineup of cutting-edge scientists present in your online series, including names like Nick Lane, doug Wallace, michael Schifra. I mean, these are at the cutting edge of quantum biology, and so it seems to me, from a perspective also of trying to understand how to best optimize human biology and prevent chronic disease, that this is where we're at collectively and this is nothing that is what is currently being addressed in, I guess, mainstream medicine, or centralized medicine as it stands, and perhaps we could, uh, start now with some real basic overviews of quantum biological concepts so that people really understand, um, this at the base layer. So so maybe, um, how would you define quantum biology, um the term maybe, to start with?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, in the simplest terms, biology is a study and really reverting to fundamental quantum mechanics as it might impact on biological systems. I think that's the simplest approach to take.
Speaker 1:And what are some of these quantum biological processes that are occurring inside cells?
Speaker 2:Well, you could start in a number of places. I often start at the notion of sort of the transition between the last 80 or 90 years of intense pharmacology, where medicine has been based almost entirely on chemicals, passenger chemicals and chemical reactions, with some cross-reference to electronics going on in nerves, for example. So I think the wave-particle duality is the one that a lot of people have a difficulty in understanding, that perhaps the stick-and-ball structure of a molecule, as we know it, is only really the most highly probable structure when you transfer from a wave to a particle. And I think that once one can grapple with the notion of a molecule being more a wave, then this pinpoint target, this silver bullet approach that has been taken for the last 50 years or so in pharmacology, where the molecule has to arrive in a specific, like filling a room with with, with a gas, as opposed to in individual uh condensed particles. So that's probably where I tend to start when I I talk to people.
Speaker 2:Then there's the issue of tunneling uh, that, uh, that, that uh. We can see that one wave, one wave form, can tunnel through another and that really brings us to the electron transport chain and we, in the very early time, with our foundation, I really set the objective of trying to visualize tunneling, and we haven't quite done that yet. And then there's the issues of superpositioning and then the very alluring thought of entanglement. Over the last six years or so, I think, we've seen a lot of these issues that can now be placed in a biological setting where, prior to that, most people thought quantum mechanics had to be very, very cold and extremely dry. And now we know that quantum biology will occur in in a a warm, wet setting of of of the cells. And I think, probably more recently was the notion of quantum spin, and that's what led us to thinking about the space, the hazards of space, health.
Speaker 1:Do you mind explaining quantum entanglement and quantum spin a little bit more?
Speaker 2:Well, einstein didn't like the idea of it. I think he called it spooky motion at a distance. This is the notion that you have two particles or waves photons, electrons, protons that are linked to one another in some way or other and immediately one considers the notion of some information travelling between them. So if one has an electron spinning in one direction and it has its entangled buddy elsewhere spinning in the opposite direction, if, if the first one changes, the second one is thought to change immediately and without, without any perceptible change in its entropy or energy. And the notion that a lot of people have is is that there's some sort of communication between the two. And I think that the best understanding is that these two entities, particles or waves, are mathematically correlated. They originated from the same point, they're mathematically correlated and therefore will be mathematically correlated, irrespective of the distance between them. And of course, a number of people say that one of them might might be here, the other one might be the other side of the galaxy, and that tends to flummox most traditional conventional scientists straight away.
Speaker 2:Uh, but uh, the you know, the recent experiments, as you know, uh, have now pretty much demonstrated that entanglement occurs. I think most people are satisfied that entanglement does occur, but it does give the opportunity for us to think about how messaging and information could spread throughout biological systems far quicker, with far less energy than had previously been thought. As you know, you and I, our brains are using about 20 watts of energy at the moment. A computer that could do the amount of computing that we do would probably need about 85,000 watts. So entanglement is very exciting.
Speaker 2:Also, it's interesting to understand how, for example, entangled photons might impact on molecules, and I don't know whether you know the work of Ted Goodson from University of Michigan. He bombarded a levithlorine anesthetic molecule with photons and established a, a conventional excited state. But when he then repeated that and bombarded them with entangled photons, he achieved a virtual excited state which they considered would only exist about once in every 10 million years. So what intrigues us is, when we're thinking about bio photons, those ultra weak emissions from mitochondria and from other parts of the cell, what intrigues us is to what extent any of those might be entangled and to what extent they might be altering the molecular interaction of incoming molecules. So that's something probably for the next decade to work out.
Speaker 1:Incredibly interesting and maybe it's a good opportunity to briefly describe the the onion root experiment and I know you had a prize and named after that, uh, onion root in terms of the history of, of this idea of, of biophoton research, and for the listeners who previously um listened to my podcast, my episode with dr jack cruz, he he mentioned um alexander gerwich specifically, so, um, yeah, do you mind sharing your perspectives on on that, on that experiment?
Speaker 2:yes, well, you know, when we started the foundation we hadn't been particularly aware of Alexander Gurwitch's work, but essentially, in 1923 he was able to show that there was information transfer from the one onion root to another onion root and to increase cellular division at the second, second onion root and he identified this as as effectively, uh, bio photons being released.
Speaker 2:Uh, and his view they were actually in the ultraviolet range, interestingly enough, and he published that work in 23. There was a lot of skepticism about it and it was really. I think it was only in the 1960s that I think his granddaughter finally produced the definitive work to show what had been done there, show what had been done there, um, but the use of um or the notion that that light will transmit information between uh, between cells or between organisms as a whole, um was of course uh used by finson, for example, in when he received the uh nobel prize in 1903 for treating um, received the Nobel Prize in 1903 for treating lupus vulgaris with ultraviolet light as well. So in the early part of last century there was quite a lot of interest in the use of light in terms of biology, in terms of therapeutics, but that, I think, got very much lost once we got into the post-war era of the pharmaceutical industry's patenting molecules and most of medicine, and most medicine research for the last 80 years or so has been based on purely molecular interactions.
Speaker 1:And that's a point that I really want to emphasize, which is that this story appears to be one of both external light, which is the interactions of, say, solar photons on biological systems, but also one of external light, which is the interactions of, say, solar photons on biological systems, but also one of internal light, which is the light being endogenously generated by structures like the mitochondria, and I believe Gerwitz he used a piece of quartz to show that the biophoton emission was in the ultraviolet range and that was actually blocked by glass. What's your perspective on this? I guess, distinction and the role of, perhaps, solar photons versus endogenously generated photons in the quantum biology story.
Speaker 2:Well, biology is pleiotropic. It will use every asset that's available and time and time again, and some processes are conserved very highly throughout evolution from much lower order organisms. The sun and solar photons represent almost entirely the source of energy that we have used to evolve and therefore it seems to be no surprise whatsoever that there are very many systems in our body that are either using photons, communicating with photons, or indeed, as part of their process, producing photons. Now, solar photons, of course, of the farm, more of them, honest, sort of sunny day. Here in England we've got about 10 to the 14 or 10 to the 15 photons per square centimeter per second in a normal daylight. I suspect in Australia it might be a bit more. And the bio photons, or the ultra weak emissions, we're down at 10 to 100 or so. So they are very, very uh weak indeed. So I think that the biophotons are really acting on on structures very, very close uh themselves if they're acting physically, but of course there are the opportunities that they may well be entangled.
Speaker 1:The solar photons, of course, in different wavelengths, can penetrate cells and whole organisms quite well, especially in the red range and specifically with regard to the frequencies or the wavelengths of light of these, of these bio photons. As you mentioned, Gerwitz's work suggested there was ultraviolet range. What is your perspective or what have you noted in terms of what ranges of light are being emitted by different parts of the cell?
Speaker 2:Well, different authors have produced different estimates there and it seems to be across the range and I suspect it might well be horses for courses. It may well depend on the purpose, function and downstream objectives of a process, a process. So we're still in the early phase of really trying to characterize these emissions. With our facilities now at Harwell, where we work with central laser laboratories, we're able to detect down to a very, very small number of biophotons. It the equipment is in a basement, in a box, in another box, another box to exclude all our extraneous light, and we have to settle the systems down.
Speaker 2:Um, we have to be be careful we're not just detecting delayed luminescence that can confuse the situation.
Speaker 2:So we're wanting to characterize the biophotons and the ideal outcome for us would be able to characterize biophotonic emissions from mitochondria that, for example, are distressed and are communicating mitochondria next to them.
Speaker 2:Now we demonstrated that in a study that was published earlier in the year Reesoulton et al where we showed non-chemical communication between mitochondria. So if that communication is with biophotons, it would be very, very interesting to understand if there is a specific characteristic and what information is being carried by a biophoton and if we can characterize biophotons which are being released from mitochondria, perhaps saying, perhaps saying look here we have a problem. Saying to the next group mitochondria, here is the solution and, by the way, here's a small packet of energy to deal with that problem. If that's what's going on, could we then, with our own lasers, emulate uh, that by a photogenic emission, and re uh, re--impact or re-target mitochondria, so that we could produce something that we've called for the last 10 years mito-tuning, and we retune mitochondria by not only, not only, directing a range of photons at them, but photons that are specifically characteristic of those type of biophotons that would have been emitted by the mitochondria.
Speaker 1:So that's one of our objectives over the next few years. Fascinating, and it gets to this idea of the function of the mitochondria and I think, at the really superficial level, what people are taught in university and school is that these are just power plants of the cell. You know using that term. But looking at what's occurring on the electron transport chain, the kind of the exhaust of this mitochondrial engine obviously is water and it's also these biofotons. I mean, they're actually being spewed out, so to speak, but perhaps not as waste. But what you're suggesting is actually perhaps as a signalling and information transfer mechanism.
Speaker 2:Yes, look, at school we were all told that mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell, and I think most life scientists would think of it as like a sort of a brazier. If you imagine, on a picket line, everybody around warming, warming their hands around a, a barrel with a, with a fire in it, and just the energy is just being distributed in any, any direction. We initially began to learn it was really more like a sort of a mobile phone battery which was discriminated as to what, how, the amount of energy it would provide. At certain times Mitochondria seem to be able to discriminate which systems do need energy and which ones don't. And the example we give is if one has two neurons requiring energy, if one gets energy and the other one doesn't, the mitochondria can actually alter behavior. There has been work associating mitochondrial function with memory, for example, and we've moved even further on.
Speaker 2:And if you go to a power station, yes, yes, there's a lot of energy generation, but probably the most important room in the entire power station is the ones where they have all the knobs and dials to decide how much power to produce, how much to dissipate, because they don't want to overfry the system. Uh, you know, removing the rods from your, your nuclear power plant, just so that you're producing just the right amount of energy and directing it to those parts of the grid that need it. And it's that information role of mitochondria that seems to come to the fore. And, as you know, with plants, of course they use the chloroplasts to produce the energy, but they also have mitochondria. So it seems that mitochondria are communicating not only with other mitochondria within the cell, but of course cells exchange mitochondria, mitochondria exchange throughout the body and there are actually free-flowing mitochondria in the plasma, although the jury's out as to whether those are fully functional or not.
Speaker 2:So part of the process of electrons huddling their way down or flowing down the electron transport chain is that needs good quantum coherence. If there's any interruption or perturbation of that, then one has this sort of visualization of electrons spilling off the side and that get doing a couple of things, producing reactive oxygen species and possibly a byproduct or a primary product, that is, the release of photons. So every time you get Ross produced, you'll get photo that by photons produced. And it certainly seems to be a case that when mitochondria are distressed or reacting adaptively, a lot of people describe mitochondrial dysfunction. What they really mean is this mitochondria is functioning perfectly well, but right at the extremes of their flexible limits. When they're distressed, it seems that there's a much greater release of these ultra-low emissions, these bio photons.
Speaker 1:It prompts a fascinating question, and I had a funny image in my mind of the Simpsons and Homer Simpson at the nuclear power plant with the donut and red lights going off. But where, do you think in the mitochondria, might that coordination decision be made in terms of, perhaps, the wavelength or the direction of light emission?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think the answer to that is we don't know at the present. One can begin to sort of reverse engineer and speculate in so much as can we identify pathophenotypes that may be associated with irregularities at different parts of the chain, and one of the culprits in the electron transport chain, I think and if you listen to Nick Lane's talks on this would be complex I. So I think complex I seems to be or the abnormalities or perturbations of complex, I seem to be responsible for a number of pathologies. And then, of course, down at the other end of the chain, the ATPase, of course, there are a number of mutations in the proton channels there that are also associated with illness. So we could sort of derive from circumstantial evidence which parts of the chain might be more important than other in communicating messages, in terms of homeostasis and in terms of adaptive responses, by when they fail, when the adaptive responses fail to adapt appropriately, and then that appears as illness or disease.
Speaker 1:But think, uh, we're not, we're not there yet, unless you have a a better notion no, no, no question just came to my mind as as you were speaking, and a question, another question that really uh sparked my mind in terms of the production, the endogenous production of light, and and really, when you mentioned the neurons, is uh this idea of the endogenous production of light? And really, when you mentioned the neurons, is this idea of endogenous light production as a signaling mechanism in the brain? And obviously clinicians in the audience will know that the brain exhibits a form of melanin called neuromelanin, which is in uh in alzheimer's disease is sorry, parkinson's disease, is is a pathologically lost and the theory that um dr jack cruz has proposed is that that that internally uh exhibited neuromelanin is acting as a form of um way of capturing indulgently generated light, um in terms of signaling and other functions, and and further to that point, is that we have expression of these non-visual photoreceptor proteins like melanopsin, throughout, throughout the brain. Do you have any insights or thoughts on on those those points particularly?
Speaker 2:well, I mean clearly, um, our, our view is that light is important for the normal functioning of the brain, both endogenous and exogenous. To deal with the endogenous initially, some of the molecules to which you're referring could possibly better be thought of as antennae to really detect incoming photons and deal with them and respond in that appropriately. There's a lot more work that needs to be done to drill down and to silo down in a sort of an old-fashioned reductionist basis to work out what's going on immediately. But what we do know is is that, um, with exogenous light, there are a number of good studies now showing the change in neural function, neuropsychiatric function, with exposure to different wavelengths of light, mainly of course in the red, near of red and of course much higher wavelengths near infrared and of course much higher wavelengths.
Speaker 2:I always think it's strange that one of our most precious organs, the brain, isn't buried deeply in our body, surrounded by layers of fat as a shock absorber, but it's sitting exposed with a very small, thin piece of bone around it, and we now know that of course, certain wavelengths of light, certainly the red light, will pass well into the brain, if not all the way through. And so to have an organ like the brain that is exposed to sunlight for the entire length of our evolution, and to know that also, that the cells within or the organelles for the entire length of our evolution, and to know that also, that the cells within or the organelles within the cells within the brain are also emitting light themselves. It seems to me that we're somewhat two or three decades late in thinking about this in the context of advances made in medicine elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Certainly, and that's the work of scott zimmerman, who's an optics engineer, showing that the uh, the sulca and the gyria really optically optimized to to concentrate near infrared photons um into the, into the gray matter. That that really makes sense, um as well to me, from from a longer wavelength light point of view. But I'm curious, uh, if you have some thoughts on how shorter wavelength light, say ultraviolet, could be penetrating into the deeper inside the brain regions when we know that they're more superficially absorbed because of its wavelengths. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Yes, well, I think the shorter wavelengths scatter far more readily and I know you spoke with Bob Fosbury and he'll talk to you about first-order scatter and so blue and ultraviolet will not really penetrate very far at all into biological systems, whereas the reds and infrared and the invisible, non-visible light photons will pass all the way through.
Speaker 2:It would seem, therefore, that over evolution, those systems that are going to use the energy of light and the information that can be carried by it and produced within it, within light, will have effectively evolved around those, um, those wavelengths that can, uh, that can penetrate the whole of the organism. Um, and equally uh. It's very helpful that, although ultraviolet light was probably extremely important in the very early days of evolution to be the very high energy source, of course as soon as DNA became available to organisms it was extremely damaging, and so one of the earlier processes in evolution must have been a way of dissipating energy not required. So if early organisms were utilising and manipulating light energy and light information, there would have to have been a very good system to dissipate it so that organisms effectively didn't fry themselves. So we I think medicine is beginning to understand a lot more about the therapeutic implications of anything above 600, 630 nanometers, and I think there's some catch-up needs to be done in terms of the ultraviolet spectrum.
Speaker 1:Yes, and the point about dissipation. I mean, I think that is that's a pretty critical again concept in quantum biology. Can you explain dissipation and this idea of a dissipative system?
Speaker 2:explain, uh, dissipation and this idea of of a dissipative system. Yeah, I mean, I think if, if, if you're going to tap into an endless source of energy emanating from the sun, um, one has to have a way of having a safety valve in terms of not being exposed to too much. Now, of course, with mitochondrial function, the mitochondria can uncouple so that you get futile cycling, usually resulting in increased heat in the cell, and it's often said that mitochondria are working at a much higher temperature than surrounding tissues. There was paper a couple of years ago saying the temperature is nearly up to 50 degrees inside those, a couple of years ago saying the temperature is nearly up to 50 degrees inside those. So I think any system that is using a freely available, abundant source of energy has to have a way of capping that energy and dissipating it appropriately. And obviously, in terms of oxidative-phosphorylation, that would be done by uncoupling the energy production.
Speaker 1:And a point to revisit quickly the quantum coherence state. There's a suggestion that one of the roles of sleep and stillness at sleep is to facilitate quantum coherence. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think that's a very interesting notion. The brain, modern humans, are, I think, subclinically inflamed. I often say that the average Roman soldier was about 7% fat or lipid, whereas the average human today is more. So we have a lot of ectopic lipid that leads to increased intracellular inflammation and I think it's fair to say that the humans as a whole, through their lifestyle, have mild mitochondrial dysfunction and intracellular inflammation. So we live in a far more inflammatory milieu than previously. The brain will also be the same, will be slightly inflamed, and it's only during sleep that that process can be reversed, I think, and certain times during sleep and that's very important to to, to to, to understand when that might be another.
Speaker 2:The work is only in the brilliance, only early phases, how sleep and quantum coherence get.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a very, very interesting thought and something that we're looking at, looking to and so I guess, uh, understanding that the mitochondria really, to me, is the, the logical focus should be the logical focus of a medicine, health science, uh, as it stands, and and, and you know, I like to often reference dr doug wallace because his concept of this bioenergetic etiology of disease was one that posited that we shouldn't be looking at individual organ-specific problems. We should recognise diseases of chronic nature in the kidney, in the heart, in the brain, as simply organ-specific manifestations of a bioenergetic failure. Organ-specific manifestations of a bioenergetic failure. So how would you describe that key concept in terms of, yeah, focusing on chronic disease and pathology.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I agree entirely. When I was a medical student, and I think even now, one is really taught that the body is self-satisfying, it provides its own homeostatic environment, and that illness and disease is sort of the addition of something new. Something extra has been added and that's what's causing the problem. We take a slightly different view and that is we're probably getting ill all the time. You've probably done that a few times since this interview started but we have the processes to correct, to regenerate and to repair, and we're doing that all the time, and that the emergence of some diseases and a lot of diseases is not really something new.
Speaker 2:Has turned up Now we can think about, you know, if one has been shot or there's a virus or something turns up, but generally it's the loss of that ability to continue to adapt and regenerate, which tends to get worse as one gets older, and all of those processes that we see in terms of mitophagy, in terms of apoptosis and regeneration of cells and reusing some of the waste that is produced by after cell death. Those all roads lead back to the mitochondria, not only in terms of providing energy to do it, but the signaling and the messaging as to when to do it. I think that having a sort of a universal notion that mitochondrial dysfunction would lead to certain diseases and organs, I don't disagree with that. But we also know that mitochondria tend to be somewhat different. If you look at the mitochondria in the retina or in the heart or in the brain, their form and functioning can seem to be different to other parts of the body. So there is some organ or organ or function specificity that would add to another layer.
Speaker 1:if you've got a generalized mitochondrial, dysfunction and this concept of mitochondrial heteroplasmy I mean, as I understand it, it's the accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations that are affecting essentially the translation of key proteins on the electron transport chain and therefore the ability of the mitochondrion to produce energy. And if there is and I guess the other point to make here is that if these are ancient bacterial remnants, which you know, so we understand them to be, then their circular DNA is not protected by a nucleus and the accumulation of reactive oxygen species from a leaky electron transport change is therefore potentially rendering them more susceptible to damage and therefore accumulation of mutation. So can you speak to mitochondrial heteroplasmy and I guess, the role it plays in potentially dysfunction or what you described as acting at the edge of its capabilities?
Speaker 2:Yes it's an area where very few researchers and clinicians really have a reasonable understanding. But it would seem that the human body adapting, especially if you've got a genetic disorder that is leading to a high level of mutation. It seems that we can tolerate really quite a high amount of mutation. Probably 50-60% of the mitochondrial DNA could be mutated to maintain some function. But I think if we look more closely we will see that more generally amongst the population. But it just doesn't, it doesn't represent itself as a, as a pathophenotype um.
Speaker 2:What we do see, of course, is um a very close association now between mitochondrial uh dna mutation and and tumors and cancers. So when we look at cancers now, we can identify some mitochondrial DNA mutations very, very regularly in those areas. So this is an area I think that is going to need a lot more research in terms of understanding how much background heteroplasmia there is and at what point is there a threshold above which the mutated dna determines the ultimate function in terms not only in energy production but probably in information transfer, and it may be in a lot of conditions that the information transfer is the thing that suffers first, for example in tumors, in cancer cells, where the possibility is that energy production continues, but information transfer is suppressed, which allows then the tumor to grow somewhat rampantly without getting the feedback from surrounding systems and organisms.
Speaker 1:And on that topic I think it was Michael Schiffer's presentation where he described the charges of different cell types, and in tumourous cells they notice a loss of negative charge. Can you explain that concept or how you think about it?
Speaker 2:It was fairly new to me that he was talking about both that in tumors, but also in wound healing as well.
Speaker 2:the differential charges so we're beginning to understand a lot more. And this again comes away from this idea that everything is to do with the transfer of chemicals, the old view of a ligand sitting on a receptor. And that's not really the only way that biology and medicine works. The charge across membranes in humans, or in any organisms, is enormous. The charge density across a membrane is something like three times that of lightning. So you know, michael, you know, I think that's absolutely right in identifying that there is the differential charges. And if they change in, say in tumors or inflamed tissues or where repair is occurring, where there's been damage to tissues, then this is far more important than has been thought of before. We have to somewhat get to grips with what's going on and how can we either manipulate or enhance the appropriate changes in charge to accelerate or to improve healing and improve therapy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that makes sense to me and I think you also. As you. As you mentioned, he described uh stem cells and they have a similar d d uh lack of or loss of um of charge. So there's uh, there's, there's obviously a very intentional effect of the human body's using um to to uh is using when it comes to that, and the other really big concept that I'd like to hear your thoughts on is biological semiconduction and this idea that proteins that are in the body are essentially semiconductors. Can you speak to that idea?
Speaker 2:Not greatly. It's not a very specific area of my knowledge at the present. We had a very good lecture by Judith Klinman a couple of years ago on that. What we are looking at, though, though, in terms of the interaction of protein with its environment and the notion of semiconductor, is looking at the layers of water, the interfacial water around proteins, and how that extends out way beyond the sort of normal distances that you would normally see bonding charges, for example and our symposium series actually next spring will concentrate entirely on water order and the quantum characteristics of water.
Speaker 2:I think it's been completely overlooked in terms of medicine. We sort of think water's water and nothing's going on there. So let's think about the proteins. So I think, when you look at the protein and proteins, how they interact, we have to look at the interfacial water around the proteins and understand what's going on there as well. And, of course, as you bombard that water with photons, you alter some of its characteristic and including some of the thought, also the viscosity, which some people say has an impact on the speed or the readiness of which the ATPase will nanomotor will rotate, for example. So we're going to be looking closely at water and certainly how it interacts with proteins. In terms of proteins and semiconductors, you'd probably have to talk to my scientists about that, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no worries, the water and light interactions are absolutely fascinating and, yeah, the idea that different light frequencies are changing the biophysical uh function of water, I mean that that is incredible. And the, the idea that even water is potentially uh, has a storage and information storage capacity, I think is is one of those corollaries which uh, which is is mind-blowing and again, so far beyond the, the current state of the art in in clinical practice, and and um, and and medicine, uh, maybe one more, one more question specifically on, on the, I guess, the biophysics of this, before we uh, we change tack and do. Can you speak to temperature and and how temperature is affecting quantum processes and perhaps mitochondrial function?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a very interesting thought. For the last 20 years I've asked all my colleagues a simple question, that is, how does a cell know what temperature it should be inside? Is it managed by a series of thermostats or whatever? Or is the temperature within a cell or within an organelle really the the result of straightforward physics, of a group of molecules in a vacuole being with a source of different sources of energy, both chemical energy and photonic energy, um, uh and electron energy. When you mix all of those factors together, does that determine what that, what the temperature would be? What is the set point of the cell? Because if you think about conventional medicine and conventional chemistry, if you change the temperature, the equilibrium within all of the uh chemical reactions is going to change, and so we have this idea also that temperature is more important to quantum effects than heat. So I think it's really important to understand how temperature is regulated. Is it regulated or is it just a result of the physics and chemistry that has been produced with the exogenous and endogenous energy supply?
Speaker 2:And, as I mentioned early on, it's thought that the temperature within mitochondria is much higher than the surrounding materials. And we do know, for example, quite a number of plants. Certain plants are exothermic, can produce temperatures regionally within themselves of six or seven degrees higher than the surrounding ambient temperature. So temperature very important, but it's really understudied. And the understanding of how temperature is maintained or modulated within the cell is it really needs further study. And I've come back to things like uncoupling. The result of uncoupling in the electron transport chain will be an increase in temperature and that might be not a byproduct, but that might be the prime reason why we see uncoupling.
Speaker 1:If one alters temperature then the quantum processes about which we're talking will themselves alter yeah, and it makes me think of the, the clinical implications, which is people and when they get cold quite often and essentially stimulate thermogenesis and in the body and the development of things like brown adipose tissue. And this has been used as an intervention to reverse metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes and it's basically upregulating the thermal generating effect and helping pull things like that ectopic lipid out of the wrong place and essentially burning it. So I'm definitely intrigued at that temperature and how that is affecting things. And the other real interest that I have is the circadian system and circadian biology and obviously it's critical to the whole organism function. Do you have any thoughts about how circadian biology and I guess, the clock genes, which are nuclear in nature in the nucleus, how are they interfacing with the mitochondrion? How are they affecting mitochondrial function and perhaps optimizing mitochondrial function?
Speaker 2:An interesting thought. I mean just going back to the point you made before, though, not all humans share the same cold genes and therefore, for example, the Arabs, the Pima Indians, those that are suffering very high levels of metabolic syndrome, are unable to futile cycle, so when they get cold they need to shiver. So it's interesting that it's not the same across all In terms of we're just, I think, at the beginning of understanding the more important role that mitochondria have in determining circadian rhythm, determining a circadian rhythm and the downstream effects that might have on on aging. Uh, again, most physicians of our generation would have been taught, told, that melatonin, for example, comes from the pineal gland and that's the end of the story. We now know probably most of it comes from mitochondria, uh the. So mitochondria clearly very, very strongly involved in circadian, in the control circadian rhythm.
Speaker 2:Now, how that interacts with these nuclear clocks, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure you have a lot more scientists with whom you speak which will understand that better than me. But what we do see is the link now between the alteration in mitochondrial function controlling circadian movement and the red-blue balance to which we're being exposed, and I think you've spoken about this and some of your guests have spoken about this that there seems to be a sort of a red starvation and a sort of a shift towards blue, which is inappropriate for where the person was born or lives. And as we've come under that, comes under stress, we might revert back to the red-blue balance that might have been needed nearer the equator a couple hundred thousand years ago, before humans were started to migrate. But that's the area that interests us in terms of the effects on mitochondrial function that have an effect on circadian rhythm, which have downstream implications for cellular and organism ageing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks. It's such an interesting topic and I really think that these type of questions are the ones that need to be funded and answered, especially in this day and age where we've electrified and lit up the whole of our nighttime in a very evolutionary and ancestrally inappropriate way. I want to ask you what are some of your favourite or interesting insights from the series that you've done, most recently with the amazing guests and researchers? I don't mean to ask you to pick from your favourite children, but which are some of the most enticing of these so-called crazy ideas that are alluring for you?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, one way of uh about that question is you perhaps ought to read the new book that we've written, the quantum biology book. That sort of really covers those. What I what I see is a bringing together of of vastly different disciplines in medicine. That's one of the things that you've mentioned. Our faculty has quantum physicists, mathematicians, astrophysicists, biologists, quantum biologists and more conventional pharmacologists. And you know, at one end we we think about the work of mike levine and how it seems that it's not just genetics that are controlling shape and function and to certainly say it may not be genetics at all.
Speaker 2:In some instances he's worked with planaria where he can change the shape, the function of planaria without altering their genetics, where we can take a part of a planaria, can be taught certain behaviors. You cut it in half, the head end grows a new tail. We will know that the tail end grows a new head. But what happens is the tail end, when it grows a new head, it exhibits the same behavior as it learned before it was cut in half. So we think about memory as can be held somatically as opposed to just in the brain. So the notion of cells being far, far smarter in terms of memory and in terms of the stimulus for shape and production possibly coming from the energetic energetics surrounding them, and I talk a little bit about the quantum fractal does, does the quantum engine of life in a way produce a shape around which that that organism grows? And each organism, uh has a unique um, each species has, has unique atpas, for example, and we have a study running with mike and wayne levine at the moment, where we're looking to transfect uh atp subunits and atp atpa subunits in a whole from one species to another to see whether we can transfer shape and function without altering genetics, so resetting a balance between the role of bioenergetics in producing form and function. And you know, it was said that life is just an electron looking for a gradient. So to understand those gradients, how you drive those gradients, and then the thought that not only can these cells, small numbers of cells, remember processes which would lead to behavior, and that might be purely back to the point I made about allocating energy to different neurons or different neural processes, processes to determine behavior, but of course the work of Sartre and Aigné, the very early lecture we had, looking at the physorum and the slime mold being able to effectively solve the traveling salesman conundrum. So the single cell, multi-nucleated, single cell slime mold was actually able to solve a problem that has flummoxed most of the world's most powerful computers. Although it's not a quantum computer, it was behaving as a quantum computer. So now we see that cells not only have an ability to remember something and pass that on, but actually they can compute problems themselves. So computation may not only occur in the brain and through quantum wave theory, as you see, in the brain, as John Joe McFadden will talk about, but that may also occur in other parts of the body. You see that sort of in other animals, things like squid and things like that, where quite a lot of processing could go away from the brain.
Speaker 2:And then we think about talking about the work of Michael Sifrin and the charge changes around scar tissue and around damage to tissues. You've probably seen the video of Mike Levine's anthrobots, which are just cells that have become like his xenobots and that they, without any prior knowledge, will run up and down a damaged tear in a neuron and, over a 72-hour period, repair it. And now what attracted them? Was that just a sort of a normal physics-related response to a change in charge across a damaged membrane and the natural response of the anthropos was to do something with it. So we then think about what is the origin of the bioelectric templates which Mike talked about, what is the fundamental generator that can generate those bioelectric templates? And in generating the energy, does it generate a shape form? And I talk in the new book a little bit about what I call a quantum fractal in terms of, I expect it, like most people understand, if you put some iron filings on a piece of paper with a magnet underneath, the iron filings will take up the shape of the magnetic field. Well, in quantum terms, is there also a shape of these quantum fields? And is it around that that biology forms life?
Speaker 2:Existed before biology, self-replicating, non-dissipating or a self-replicating, dissipating process which decreased or didn't increase entropy as much or as little as possible, and that biology just made that process portable.
Speaker 2:And this also leads to the notion that when we're looking for life outside the earth, the problem is, most people are looking for biology, but it may not be biology at all.
Speaker 2:It may just be a very, very specific, uh, energetic entities that are else able, able to self-replicate and carry information with them and, as you know, the physical data hold back entropy. You need energy and information, and that's why we think mitochondria is so important in that role. So we then link that into into where is the seat of this energy and information production, and all of those roads lead, in our mind, back to mitochondria, although of course there is still there's a very good notion now of non-mitochondrial ATP production, and so that's something else that we have to think about again. So ATP production may be more widespread than just purely in mitochondria. And then the next link is how we then link those bioenergetic processes to the myriad of pharmacological or biological systems that have been described over the last 60 years. That's what I'm trying to bring together, and from that come up with new, obviously, diagnostic modalities and new therapeutic modalities, which I think will occupy us for the next couple of decades.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely fascinating stuff, and I'd also point the listener to your 2016 review paper, the Quantum Mitochondria and Optimal Health, and we touched on a couple of the topics in that paper, but I think there was still a lot more that we haven't, so I'm obviously mindful of your time, professor, guy, so I really appreciate you coming on and speaking with me. Where can people learn more about the book that you're um, that you've written, and obviously more about the guy foundation and and the the series that you do? You operate?
Speaker 2:So the guy foundation just Google the guy foundation and you'll land on our homepage. Uh, we have information there of our symposium series, the next one and the last ones, all of the symposia that we run. We run two series per year, one in the spring, one in the autumn. I think there's about 55 videos now. They're about an hour each, with a range of scientists that form our faculty globally. Those are all on the website, but they're also on YouTube. There's a YouTube channel and we also on the site describe the research that we funded, both in the UK, us and elsewhere, and we curate the research programme to try and guide the process forwards.
Speaker 2:What we're trying to do with the foundation not only is funding research and leading it forward and bringing people together into a room being in a virtual room, of course that would never normally find themselves in the same room. That's the important thing is to try and overcome some of the really interesting thoughts, and we have quantum physicists and physicists and on the whole, physicists do a lot of hypothesis generating, but occasional uh experiments. I think it took what? 40 years for the higgs boson experiment to be to be undertaken. Um, but once they've done the experiment, if the experimental findings correlate with the model, then it's given a tick and they move on.
Speaker 2:Life scientists are driven very much by experimentation. I think it was Boyle who said that science is animated through experimentation. But you have to think about it a bit more. And of course, the grants and the ways life science is funded is funded on the back of experimental proposals for experiments, but probably there's not enough hypothesis generation thinking about it, life scientists. So initially we had all these different scientists all with the same notion that quantum biology was of great interest, but the physicists saying you haven't thought about it enough and the life scientists saying where's your data?
Speaker 2:yeah, and now what we've hopefully managed to do is create those stepping stones in between to be able to have a to bring. Bring these together's, I think is the fundamental role of it. The book. By the way, here's a revised copy of the book Quantum Biology.
Speaker 2:We wrote a book a couple of years ago about how we developed cannabidiol CBD, which I think a lot of people around the world will know a lot about. But when I first started with our cannabinool cbd which I think a lot of people around the world will know a lot about, but when I first started with our cannabinoid program, cannabidiol was described as an inert component of the cannabis plant and so we wrote a book about it and there was a chapter in that book. That book was called a worthwhile medicine and we wrote a chapter about quantum biology. And this was a few years ago and the publisher said nobody understood it. Could you write a book that the layperson could understand? So we've written this book. It publishes in England, I think next week, on the 28th of November, and I actually saw it's on Amazon if people want it. So it's quantum biology by me.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. Well, I'll definitely share that link out and I'll definitely be grabbing myself a copy. So I agree that you know this is such a sorely needed area of education and research and, like you, I share the thought that this is how we help optimize human health. So any final parting thoughts that you have for the listeners, and maybe medical practitioners, doctors, medical students who might be listening yes, I think the important thing is to level the playing pitch of knowledge and understanding.
Speaker 2:When we thought about the book, I found over the last six or seven years it is much, much easier to explain quantum biology to a layperson who bases well, that's extremely interesting or that's fascinating, and this happens, and this happens, whereas when we start with conventional, traditional scientists, you can sometimes not get past the first sentence before the scientist says, oh, whoa, hold on, that's not what I learned. So what I would say is level the playing pitch, just sort of set to one side the more conventional thoughts about biology, about physiology, about pharmacology, and understand a little bit of what really absolutely drives us. And I often say to people imagine you and I had been having this conversation and say, for example, this cup, for example, had hovered there for the whole conversation. Okay, someone might say to you well, what did, uh, what did dr guy, what did professor guy say to you? And you say I have no idea. I couldn't take my off this cup. It was suspended there. I had, I had no idea how it was suspended there. It absolutely was miraculous.
Speaker 2:And I say to physicians, I say when you look at life, when you look at humans. It's as confusing, as complex and as miraculous as that cup being suspended there. And it's worthwhile spending a bit of time if you're a physician or a life scientist not just to dig straight into what's a disease and what's an illness and how we treat it, because medicine is mainly pattern matching. It's a lot of pattern matching. But actually go back to fundamentals, say, well, if I'm treating these organisms, these humans, it might be worthwhile understanding what drives them, what actually makes a cell work, actually makes a cell work. And what we now know is it doesn't stop just at chemicals, it doesn't stop just at nerves traveling rather slowly up up and signals traveling rather slowly along nerves. But the quantum biology or quantum science and quantum mechanics has a fundamental role in the fundamental workings of us, allowing electrons to flow down a gradient. That's what life is all about.
Speaker 2:And I say to these doctors, everything from the chin downwards is orientated to finding glucose for the brain, because the brain needs glucose, we need oxygen, and that those two are incorporated in in maintaining uh, in maintaining these gradients. And so that's what I'd say to to doctors is sort of just open your mind a little bit and think about uh, and read this quantum science and try and escape the norms of of medical teachings of the last 50 years or so, which has been extremely syllogistic. There's a lot of syllogism, there's a lot of if this, then that, and a lot of medical thinking relies on the modern-day doctor, considering that they understand the mechanism of action and, frankly, if they don't understand the mechanism of action, they can't get involved with therapy. I'm tend to be a phenomenologist. I observe phenomena, I believe the patient. Why doesn't somebody else and begin to manipulate and use that phenomena and see if we can alter it, see if we can emulate it and and harness it for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes, uh, or prophylactic purposes, and I so.
Speaker 2:I think one has to set aside that syllogism of intellect and and just be rather more accepting that these rather odd things, very weird things that go on in in in quantum physics, just accept that, okay. Okay, that's fine, let's accept that happens. Now what is the impact of this in human physiology and human biology and to what extent can we understand it, grapple with it and manipulate it? And that's obviously something that we've published recently in our space report.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we didn't get into the space report. We were, we, we. Maybe that's a topic for another episode and and I'll point people to my previous episode, I did a presentation about the space report, but but really, um, I I couldn't agree, agree with you anymore and I I really think what, what you're doing and the emerging field of quantum biology is the core of what is a decentralized movement in science and health, and that decentralization is answering questions that centrally funded, centrally administered, maybe even gated institutions haven't given us answers to these complex questions. So, and yeah, very much appreciate your work and the work of the foundation. I'll be be uh, following, following it very closely um, into the future. So thank you very much, uh, professor, guy, uh, for for your time. It's been fascinating and intriguing.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
