ULTIMATE COMPUTING - Quantum Consciousness Studies

Protein Conformational Dynamics 145
biological evolution of this dielectric strength on a molecular scale must have
strong significance. Biological organisms are relatively impervious to effects of
electromagnetic radiation, yet can be exquisitely sensitive to it in some
circumstances. Some biological functions border on the limit imposed by
quantum mechanics. Our eyes are sensitive to single photons and certain fish are
sensitive to extremely weak electric fields. Such performances, according to
Fröhlich, require the use of collective properties of assemblies of biomolecules
and certain types of collective behavior such as coherent vibrations should be
expected.
If coherent oscillations representing dipole vibrations within molecular
systems do coherently oscillate in the range of 10 9 to 10 11 Hz, it should be
possible to excite these modes by electromagnetic radiation. In order to couple
and excite the biological vibrations, radiation should be matched to the biological
frequency and the wavelength should be large compared to the dimension of the
oscillating object. A significant amount of evidence supports this notion.
Irradiation of a great variety of biological objects with coherent millimeter waves
in the frequency region of 0.5 x 10 11 Hz can exert great influences on biological
activities provided the power supply lies above a critical threshold (Grundler and
Keilman, 1983). According to Fri hlich, the biological effects are not temperature
effects. They show very sharp frequency resonances which indicates that
localized absorption in very small spatial regions contributes to the biological
actions.
The sharp resonance of this sensitive window has a frequency width of about
2 x 10 8 Hz. The layer of ordered water and ions subjacent to membranes and
cytoskeletal structures (the “Debye layer”) absorbs in the region of 10 8 Hz. This
suggests that the Debye layer is closely involved with the dynamic functional
activities of the biostructures which they surround. Green and Triffet (1985) have
modeled propagating waves and the potential for information transfer in the
dynamics of the Debye layer immediately beneath membranes and cytoskeletal
proteins. They have hypothesized a holographic information medium due to the
coherent vibrations in space and time of these biomolecules. The medium they
consider is the ordered water and layers of calcium counter ions surrounding the
high dipole moments in membranes and biomolecules. Thus they have developed
a theory of ionic bioplasma in connection with nonlinear properties which relates
to the existence of highly polar metastable states. The small scale and ordering
would minimize friction in these activities. Fröhlich observes: “clearly the
absence of other frictional processes would present most interesting problems.”
He suggests the possibility of propagating waves due to the lack of frictional
processes (“superconductivity”) in the biomolecule itself as well as the layer of
ordered water or Debye layer (Kuntz and Kauzmann, 1974). Until recently,
superconductivity has been considered to occur only in certain ordered materials
at temperatures near absolute zero. Recent discoveries, however, have shown that
superconductivity can occur in materials at higher temperatures due apparently to
coherent ordering and coupling among localized and collective lattice vibrations
(Maddox, 1987; Robinson, 1987).
Expanding on Fröhlich’s work, Wu and Austin (1978) conclude that
oscillating dipoles within a narrow band of resonance frequencies with large
enough coupling constants may be expected to cause strong long range (about 1
micron) attractive forces among dipoles. In a dense microtubule array, 1 cubic
micron (one billion cubic nanometers) would encompass about 160,000 tubulin
subunits-an array sufficiently large for collective effects.
Evidence for such “long-range” effects have been observed in the behavior of
red blood cells. Discoids of eight micron diameter (8 thousand nanometers), red