Quantum Jazz Biology
When the be-close-in-the-heart one of the figures of THIS 21 ERA SCIENTIST
Mey-Hwa
Ho tells about herself and about her pioneering work in understanding life…..
Question : Please tell us a little bit about your background and schooling.
Ho: I was born in Hong Kong; started
school in Chinese and then transferred to an English school for girls, run by
Italian
nuns. I got exposed to serious Western
ideas late-ish in life, when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I was quite good
in school, and the nuns let me do
whatever I liked; didn’t have to listen if I got bored. So I escaped the worst
of reductionist Western education because ideas that didn’t fit just rolled off
my back. I guess that explains why I’m always at odds with whatever the
conventional
theory is in every single field that I go into.
I was in the convent school until I entered Hong Kong University to read
biology and then biochemistry as a PhD. Again, I learned almost nothing useful
during that time. Maybe I exaggerate: I learned, by myself, of things I liked
to learn about. After I finished university, I got a postdoctoral fellowship,
and began to change fields because I didn’t like the kind of research I was
doing. I began
to revolt against neo-Darwinism and
the reductionistway of looking at things in bits.
I had gone into biochemistry for my Ph.D. because of something I heard from one
of the professors who quoted Albert St. Györgyi - the father of
biochemistry—that
life was interposed between two energy levels of an electron. I thought that
was sheer poetry. That made me want to know, “what is life?”
So I went into biochemistry thinking I would find the answer there. But it was
very dull because biochemistry
then was about cutting up and grinding up everything, separating, purifying.
Nothing to tell you about what life is about.
Biology as a whole was studying dead,
pinned specimens. There was nothing that answered the question, what is
biological organization? What
makes organisms tick? What is being alive? I especially detested neo-Darwinism
because it was the most mind-numbing
theory that purports to explain anything and everything by “selective
advantage”, competition and selective advantage.
I spent a lot of time criticizing neo-Darwinism until I got bored. What
neo-Darwinism
leaves out is the whole of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, all science in
fact. You don’t even need any physiology or developmental biology if everything
can be explained in terms of selective advantage and a gene for any and every
character, real or imaginary.
Finally, I met some remarkable people and learned a lot from them, and
completely
changed my field of research to try and answer that haunting question, “what is
life?” I wrote a book on
the ‘physics of organisms’, not
‘biophysics’, which is largely about the structure of dead biological materials
and physical methods used in characterizing them. The physics of organisms is
about
living organization, quantum coherence and other important concepts.
Question : Did you change fields during your schooling or afterward?
Ho: It was after my schooling; almost a
complete break with my previous training. In the first year of university, we
had to do everything. We had to do all sorts of chemistry, including
thermodynamics. Thermodynamics was the first class in the morning. It was a
huge class. I always arrived late. The lecturer spoke very quickly, very
quietly, wrote on the board with one hand and rubbed off with the other. So I
understood nothing at all.
I had to relearn all the thermodynamics, but that came later. The first person
who
started to influence me was Fritz Popp,
a quantum physicist studying light emission from living organisms. When I first
met him, I didn’t understand a single word of what he was saying, but he
mentioned something called quantum coherence.
I had a feeling it was very important, and I decided to find out as much as
possible
about it.
Question: Who were some of your other influences?
Ho: The second person whose work
influenced me most was Herbert
Fröhlich. Fröhlich was a solid-state physicist. He was very interested
in why organisms are, among other things, so sensitive to electromagnetic
fields and microwaves of very low intensity, very weak fields, such as those
from high tension power lines and mobile phones. He had a theory of ‘coherent
excitations’ that
was related to the theory of quantum coherence because he treated the organism
almost
like a solid-state system.
Read the rest of this interview
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