The Spark of Life

Hey, I'm Molly Webster. Hey, I'm Mona McGowker. Mona and I just made a snail episode. It's called Snail Sex Tape. And we have not stopped talking about snails for like months. We've become deeply obsessed with snails. I think we should all get snail tattoos. Ooh, snail tattoo could be cute. But you know what you can get instead of a snail tattoo. What? You can get an enamel snail pin in honor of our snail sex tape episode. I've never been more honored in my life. I know. It is based on a real medieval snail miniature. I will be rocking it on my jean jacket all spring long. So to get one of these pins, you have to join the lab. And when you join the lab, in addition to helping fund our show, you get access to sponsor-free podcasts, plus monthly bonus content, plus invitations to events with the team. Including an AMA that we're going to be doing next month, you and me, about the behind the scenes of making snail sex tape. Behind the shell. BTS. All you have to do is go to radiolab.org slash join. And if you use the code word snail, you get two months off the first year of an annual membership. Get your pin. And we can't wait to see you guys next month. Thanks, everyone. Wait, you're listening. OK. All right. OK. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Lab. Radiolab. WNYC. The SIG. See? Yep. Wait. Wait, am I glowing right now? You certainly are. Yeah. Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster. So I was a bio major. And we had to take maybe one physics class. And then we never thought about it again. And this is often how it goes in the sciences. You've got biology, the environment, animals, our bodies, the kind of organic, messy physical stuff. That's on one side. And then you have physics, all the abstract stuff, waves, energy, invisible particles. That's all on the other side. I know how to use these. They very much feel like two different worlds. Can I ask you a couple questions before we get started? You can ask me so many questions. But for Neurosha Marugin, they go hand in hand. I'm Neurosha Marugin, an applied biophysicist from Waterloo, Canada. And most biophysicists look at mostly bio. I'm on the other end, who likes to be 50-50. What I learned from talking to Neurosha and what you're going to hear in our conversation today, it is definitely a leap into the unknown. But it starts with a very simple idea about how living things, bacteria, cactuses, humans, whatever, how they do what they do. And it's an idea that made me think about the kind of mark we leave on the world. So we're going to start with Neurosha as a student. I mean, I can tell you a very specific moment in grad school that... Tell me. When I was living in the dorms and I was making mashed potatoes and I burnt myself. And then, I don't know why I thought this, but I thought it was really exciting. Yeah. How quickly that information of me burning my hand went into my body for me to remove my hand. Like, that signal had to go up my arm, things had to change, and move all the way back down my arm for me to remove it. Think of the molecular interactions. Neurosha says she was standing there thinking about all the little molecules in her skin and nerves and spine, all these proteins bumping into each other, interacting and passing along a signal. Burn. Ow. Until it reached her spine. And then, a signal goes back. More proteins bumping into each other, interacting, signaling, move. Move your hand, move your hand. Back down her arm, all in a split second. And suddenly, it just seemed impossible. When we think about a protein, proteins have a very specific shape, and that shape determines their function. So when you think of a cell doing what it needs to do, on the surface of a cell, there are other proteins, which is what we call receptors. And those receptors have a shape to them. And for them to interact, there needs to be a physical interaction of that protein into the receptor. Yeah, there's this shorthand that we use for talking about biology, which is that a lock and a key go together, and that makes things happen in the cell. Correct. So something is a shape, and it fits into a hole. It's as simple. That's the fundamental basis of biomolecular interactions. But thinking about all of that for that one specific molecule to find that perfect receptor just seemed like it was too easy. Really? Yeah. I'm like, wow, this is why you were a better bio student than I was, because I was like, I don't know. There's a lock. There's a key. One of them is the lock shape. One of them is the key shape. The key goes into the lock. It's just floating along. It finds it. So that's exactly the model that didn't sit well with me. So imagine you're one of those janitors with a big ring of keys. How do you find that right key for the right lock in that right amount of time to induce signaling? You've got to go through all those keys. You've got to try, iterate through random probability and get the right shape in the right space. Yeah, and with also, if you think about the interior of a cell, it's like there's thousands of other proteins, and there's trash, and there's the nucleus, and there's, I don't know, endoplasmic reticulum. There's all sorts of things inside the cell that are between the lock and the key, between the two shapes, like finding each other. Correct. This is what I was uncomfortable with, is think of that time, and think of the probability of you finding your shape in 1,000th of a second. Damn, it's pretty fast. It's like the janitor took the ring of keys and just threw it at a lock, and somehow the right key on that ring gets into the lock, and it makes it across the space, even though there's so, so much in the middle. Yeah, exactly. And that's just one interaction. And so if you break it down that way, and that's what I learned in school, things weren't adding up. There's something missing. There had to be something else to induce signaling inside of a cell. So my advanced immunology teacher in grad school, I after class went up to him, and I was like, well, how does that lock and key model make sense? Think of the time and the probability, and I asked him that question, and he said, I don't know, but this is how it works. I'm like, no, but how? Like, you know, I'm that annoying crash student, and was like, but like, can you tell me a little bit more? Like, where does the time fit in? And he said, this is just the way it is. I don't know how it works. And that I don't know was enough for me to figure out, maybe I can go find out that I don't know. As Neurotia kept puzzling this, she thought maybe there's something in physics, the world where particles are always zipping around really fast. Maybe there's something there that could help me out. The gap that I was trying to fill is that, how can the chemistry, how can the physical interactions occur so quickly? Why can't we have the same thing, but through non-physical interactions? So the way that I kind of like picture it is, maybe if you had a door with a tap card access versus an actual old school locking key, you can open the door both ways. Either the proteins can do it, that will take a longer time to do the behavior, or like a wireless tap where you can just kind of put a card against a key receiver, and there's a signal or a door opens. So, okay, what can be faster that cells can use to communicate? What is the fastest signal that we know, light? It is the fastest modality that exists in our universe. And then you go out, or what I did, is to research to see if anyone else has asked those questions and how they test them. Ooh, okay. And through my research, I found the original papers that showed that biology emits light. Biology emits light, yeah. What Nerocia stumbled into was a weird little corner of biology pioneered by this Russian biologist, Alexander Gervich. In the 1920s, he did a series of experiments on onion roots to understand how they grow. And I'm gonna real with you, the original papers in Russian, it was kind of a crazily complicated experimental setup, but basically in the process of doing these experiments, he made a discovery that seemed to suggest that the onion cells inside the roots were making and releasing their own light. It was the very first instance that someone thought, hey, biology emits light. That was the first experiment. What we now know is every cell in your body does give off light. Every cell. Any kind, heart cell, liver cell, brain cell, cheek cell, skin cell, liver, tongue cell, everything. And the how kind of comes down to the part of the cell that's actually giving off light, which is involved with metabolism. So if anything can metabolize, plants give off light, shrimp give off light, literally everything that is alive emits light. So I'm glowing right now. You sure are. You're glowing right now. Absolutely. Why can't I see it? Because that's a good question. Finally, we get to one. No, that's fantastic. We physically can't see it. It's because the intensity of light is so weak. And it has to come and go through all this tissue to come outside so that we could see it. And so if you take a cell and a dish, any cell and a dish, it will give off light. And we now know very confidently that it's wavelength specific. What does that mean? Different rates of metabolism will induce different wavelengths of light, so in different colors. So not only am I emitting light or cells are emitting light, they could be emitting light of different color. Correct. Wait a second. So when my friends try and drag me down to get my aura red, is that this? So the intensity of light is definitely not as bright as some of the aura pictographs that you might see. Okay. For us to detect it, we have to have an ultra dark room and use these high sensitive detectors to even detect one photon. Okay, so if I'm a cell and I'm giving off light, and maybe we have to pick a specific cell, I don't know, how does that actually work? So let's dig into that a little bit. We know that light gets emitted from cells. The question now is where exactly is it coming from? That's the question that I get all the time. What's the mechanism? My hypothesis is that most of it kind of comes down to the mitochondria. So you probably know this. One of the structures inside the cell is the mitochondria. It looks like a microscopic kidney bean with tiny little folds inside of it, and it is often called the powerhouse of the cell. Hey, internet. It creates all of the energy that makes us run. So that's neurons firing, muscles contracting, bodies working. It all comes from the mitochondria. And the way that works is molecules will pass electrons back and forth to each other all along the inner folds, and that process of passing releases energy. So in that process, the electron goes from a high energy all the way down to a low energy state. It's like a high energy electron, like a kid with a lot of sugar, and then like a low energy electron is like when they they come down off the sugar. That's one way to look at it. Yes. Yeah, so during that hop, it releases energy, which is light. Hmm. That this part is like the juicy part. So you're saying that, I don't know, we're giving off life because we're doing fun things with our electrons. Because we're alive. We're because, yeah. There are a number of different ideas about where light could be coming from inside the cell. It could be these electrons. It could be a buildup and release of charged particles. It could be something having to do with fatty acids. It could be a combination of things. For Neurocia, she's finding that when she interrupts that electron chain, the light changes. If the electron doesn't make it, there should be no light. That's the logic. And that's what we're starting to find. Do you have a sense of how many photons a cell is emitting at any moment? Yes. So when we measured it. So if you take a dish of brain cells from a rat, if it's just that rest, just doing nothing really, you probably get around 100 photons a second. How a dish of brain cells, like how many brain cells is that? About a million. So say a million brain cells emitting 100 photons a second as a group. As a group. OK. And then when you activate them, we get signals anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 photons a second. OK. OK, wait. I got really lost in an image of the mitochondria just releasing fireworks all the time. Like I was like, oh, these little cells are popping off. It's like after a baseball game on the 4th of July. Yeah. That's probably accurate. And is it that light that I might potentially be seeing if I had an amazingly dark space? That's exactly it. Yeah. OK. Why did I not learn about this? That's an excellent question. That's something that I would like to change. I think there's a lot of resistance to trying to understand this. About like 10 years ago when I first started this stuff, I had my first backlash when I presented this as a graduate student at a conference. Oh. It was awful. Wait, what happened? I presented our first because I was really excited about this. So I wanted to incorporate this into my graduate thesis. And oh, boy, did I get it. Oh, this is noise. This is not science. You're going to jeopardize your career. Stop this. Go back into cell biology. I wonder if some of it is like people have been like, that's bullshit. Because it's like we've already talked about auras. I can imagine like a lot of folks being like, no, this isn't legit. I think there's a lot of that. But within the last decade, it's not just me. There's several other researchers across the globe. So now there's an acceptance of, OK, we'll believe it. There's light coming off of biology. Now the resistance is, OK, we accept that there's light coming off. But it's noise. It's not meaningful light that's used in biology. So what I'm looking into now is, OK, light's being generated from the mitochondria. Does that light carry some form of information that the cell can use to do what it needs to do? Is it purposeful and then being utilized by the body? Yeah. So I was thinking, OK, we're sitting in a bath of light that's coming from this big ball of fire, which we call the sun. Does this light have any impact on our physiology? Like, you know, OK, before I understand internal light, what does external light do? I see. You were just like, how are we interacting with external light? Does any of that apply to the internal light we're making? The light's the same. The photon is the same. For example, there are these proteins called options in your eyes that help convert different wavelengths of light that help regulate circadian rhythms. I guess that makes sense to me because the eyeball is a light. Sensing organ. The light sensing organ. And so it senses light. But that's where my light interaction like shuts down. And you're sounds like you're saying there's war. Light interactions happening. Yeah. I mean, if you go to any literature, the first thing that will come up is vitamin D synthesis is that, OK, the sun hits your skin and your skin processes vitamin D and, you know, that does a lot of things from metabolism. So you're saying like my skin is working with the sun. Absolutely. Absolutely. So like sun hits me, correct? And then what does my body do? The vitamin D precursors absorb a certain wavelength from the sun. Absorbent wavelengths. The wavelength. Yeah, there's information in that light. And they convert shape. That shape is what we can absorb. My God, I never thought of us as so plant like. Yeah. Yeah, we are. We are essentially like energetic converters converting sunlight into energy for our life. Wait, is that the only direct interaction I have with the wavelengths from the sun that I'm like actively converting? No, we have light receptors in our brain. Seems so dark in there. Exactly. Our pigment cells, like, you know, the melanocytes, the hemoglobin that carries the oxygen within your red blood cell absorbs light. OK, there are a lot more. And we're starting to see more and more as as people start to look at interactions with light, we can see that molecules have inherent abilities to absorb light. We as creatures have evolved with the sun for so long that there are many, many elements of our cells that are able to absorb light. And so now the question is, if that's the case, could the light coming from inside of our cells also be absorbed? Could it be used purposefully to trigger some processes in us? Yeah, that's a good question. And we don't know. My hypothesis is that the cell generating light is purposeful. But we don't have the evidence to strongly say yes or no. Interesting. Like, so we really are in a lot of, like, theoretical ideas. Like, once we get beyond the revelation, which will be a revelation to a lot of people that biological material cells, me, you, are emitting light, then a lot of the questions that come after that of, like, how, why, when. What does it mean? What does it mean? That's TBD. Those are all next steps. So I think, yeah, there's some, like, a lot more questions to be asked. Coming up, Neurocia tries to find out what the light inside our bodies might be doing. Like, what are those little photons up to? The cellular fireworks continue after the break. Hi, this is pianist Manny Axe, host of the new WQXR podcast, Classical Music Happy Hour. I'm excited to celebrate the podcast's recent launch, and I hope you'll join our party. Some of my podcast guests will be there, including actor David Hyde-Piers, writer John McQuarter, and comedian violist Isabel Hagen. And maybe a surprise guest or two. Join us for a night of music, conversation, games, and of course, cocktails. That's Monday, March 23rd at 7 p.m. in the green space. For more information and tickets, go to WQXR.org. Hey, I'm Molly Webster. We are back. We're stepping into a world of questions. And one of the first ones Neurocia wants to tackle is how what seems like a cellular fireworks show might actually be more like a laser or something. I mean, and then the next question, if this light that's coming off of these mitochondria, if it's purposeful, how would it be? How is it getting from point A to point B in this hell? Like if there's a purpose to the light and it's directed, it's a sentinel of information, like, I don't know, isn't it a photon? Don't they just flow through things when it's like- Photons scatter, right? Okay. So like photons, when it gets released, it's not like I'm going this direction. It'll be scattered. I'm not going north. I'm just an explosion of photons. Photons. And if we are going to say that it's purposeful, it needs to be guided into a destination. So then your question is how does it get from A to B without going off course in a photon like manner? Correct. And like, what is the biology that would support that? And there is some evidence suggesting that maybe the cytoskeleton is a means to guide photons. What's that? Cytoskeleton. Yeah. It's the skeleton, the scaffolding of the cell. Okay. It's specifically made up of various proteins and the one of our interest within this scaffold is called microtubules that form in a long rod-like structure. They're the ones that help create that shape of the cell. So every cell is filled with individual little tubules- Little rods. That are help giving it its shape, little rods. And your question was, do those things suck up some of the light? Correct. Because if you look at images of a cell, you can actually see mitochondria really, really close to these cytoskeletal rods. And they get moved along the cytoskeleton, like little train tracks to physically move within cells. Oh, mitochondria themselves will attach on to these microtubules and move around. Yes. And that's how things move within the cell. It's not just random blobs floating around. I don't know. I mean, it sounded like everything was floating. There's a little tram system that's inside the cell. Yeah. That's so cute. And things hop on and off. Okay. It's exactly there. They're called kinesins and dininesins. But I'm going to stick with tram. Sure. But so, you know, if the mitochondria are in close proximity to these railway tracks or these microtubules, the light that's being emitted could be absorbed by that microtubule and be propagated down that track. Like a fiber optic cable. Huh. And so what we're testing right now is a series of experiments to see if the microtubule is that biological fiber optic cable. Okay. But do you have any proof thus far that that light is not just being cast off like fireworks into the cellular night, that it is actually being moved from an A to a B? We are working on that currently right now. But we do have strong evidence to show that the light that's being generated from neural cells, your brain cells, they are not random, that they are tied to purposeful activity of those neurons. So when there's activity in the brain, there's light in the brain? That's correct. I mean, do you have any hypotheses of like what information light might be carrying inside the brain? Well, it's the same kind of question. We can, what kind of information does electricity carry? I don't know, Nero, should I just ask the questions? I'm not. No, no. But the information in this case is that the fact that, you know, maybe the wavelength, the oscillations of these light, the fact that they could carry biological information itself would be meaningful. Because if you look into your brain, between your two brain cells or, you know, things that carry information in from one part of your brain to the other, we call that the white matter or the axons. The white matter we're starting to see can carry photons. So maybe each of those bundles of nerves act like a fiber optic cable. And the same fiber optic cable that we see in telecommunication, they carry pulses of light that, you know, that we use to carry information. Why can't our brain do that? Hmm. And this could be like memories? Is it like signals? A thought. Why can't a thought be transported in the form of light? And it kind of, you know, if we're really thinking far ahead, are these photons involved in trying to help us understand consciousness? Oh. There's honestly so much about this world of light inside the body that we don't know yet. Some of the researchers describe this field as risky. Like it could all add up to nothing. But if they're right, it could change everything or at least a lot of things. For Neurosia, even if she doesn't know what the purpose of the light is inside the body, like even if there isn't one, it might have a purpose for us outside the body. What myself and a few other people are doing is the photons are there. Can we use it to discriminate between things? If they're at the very least tied to metabolism, are they photonic biomarkers? Like can I say, I know that's a heart. I know that's a tumor. I know that's a kidney. That's it. At the very least, can we do that? And so what I'm trying to do is use that for cancer. So for cancer use, we know that cancer have dysfunctional mitochondria or non-normal. So from there, can you imagine if when at the very beginning inception, we can pick up that early change as soon as they happen, as soon as they're different from their healthy counterparts? If we can pick up that using photons, that means we can pick up cancer as early as the inception point. We don't need to have an exact answer to that. We don't need to have an accumulation of molecules and mutations. We don't have to wait that long. Yeah, you need like a whole tumor. Yeah, you need a sizable mass, basically. To say, hey, your body's growing cancer. I guess the question then is, is there a significant difference between the photon release in cancer cells versus other cells? Yes, and we've shown that and we've published that. They have two different light signatures. So with the light coming off cancer, you guys are actually diagnosing cancer earlier? Yes. Yes, with confidence I can say as we've published papers on this now. So we can tell whether there is cancer within an animal as early as that we've injected it. So in these experiments, we'll take a rat and we have injected underneath its skin melanoma. And on day one after injection, and we did this in a double-blind way where a grad student has come with detectors to look at animals that were injected, where this is not injected, you can tell within day one. There's cancer there. Wow. So even if the light was not biologically purposeful, you're thinking maybe it could still be diagnostically useful. So it's like basically we've walked through, I'm just going to make you say it again, but you've walked through brain cells that let out photons, tumor cells that let out photons, normal body cells that let out photons. You're saying everybody, every cell that you've looked at is letting off photons. Absolutely. So there's a paper that was published that showed that you can tell when an animal is alive and dead just by looking at their photon signatures. Oh my God, this is the question I want to ask you. Yeah. When does the light start? And then does it truly go away? Yeah. And in that paper, I think the initial study was to just look at these different kinds of detectors when an animal is alive and dead, and the photon signatures obviously dissipate when the animal dies. But that study didn't look at, which you alluded to, is when. When in that time scale does this signature end? And that would be really cool. When does the glow stop when you're dead? For example, in hospice care, people report this death flash. What's that? I originally heard about this when I went to a consciousness conference and there was this cardiothoracic surgeon. He would say that he's seen it or his staff in the OR has seen this very sudden flash of light. And I'm like, you have like OR lights everywhere. So that's where I initially heard it and I like looked into it a little bit and there's hospice nurses that have anecdotally mentioned this. Like a surgeon's just saying just for the purpose of surgery where we stop a heart and start a heart, there's like an electric explosion of light? Yeah. No. Yeah. These are reports. Are there any experimental evidence? I'm not sure. They're anesthesiologists. Why would there be a big explosion of light you could suddenly see? I don't have the scientific evidence for this, but... You know, yeah, you clearly, yeah, but I'm just saying like what my, I don't know how to solve that at all. Well, when things die, there's a sudden release of these electrons. They're not being propagated into certain proteins, right? These electrons have nowhere to go. And so when you have high energy protons, dissipating, release is light. So that's my hypothesis. Wow. When the system, yeah, it goes back to like physics when there's no organization from biology that energy has to go somewhere. The energy has to go somewhere. So it just is released. It is the fireworks that I've been talking about. I think so. I think biology, these biomolecules, the membrane, all of these stuff inside of cells help organize that energy into meaningful process. So that's why I was saying way back when our beginning of our conversation is when we reframe our understanding of cells being these energetic bodies, I think the physical dimension makes a lot more sense. Do we have any idea of when, like, the light first turns on? Well, there's a really cool video that I can send to you where someone showed us the life flash. As soon as a sperm enters the egg, there's a huge calcium influx. Have you seen that video? No. Yeah. Wait, can I see this video? Yeah, yeah. You think it's just around? You should be able to Google it. Type in, I don't know, calcium life flash. I'm getting so excited. Watch fireworks explode when a human egg is fertilized. All right, I'm hitting play. It's stat news, so I believe it. What? Whoa. Yeah. It is like an ex- it's like a- there's like a round egg, and then the sperm is at the edge. And then you just see kind of this explosion come off the surface. Flash, yeah. Wow. I mean, it is really crazy because literally after we have this conversation, I'm going down to South Carolina where my dad is in hospice, like, near the end of his life. And you do have all these questions about just like what's happening, what's unfolding, like a notion that I mean, I'm sure I'm not going to see like a flash of light happen. I mean, I'll keep my eyes peeled, but you know, just like the notion of like a signal out into the world. Like that's so visual, even if we can't really see it, but like light is so meaningful to us, you know, that it could- that like it is a signature of us and that that it's like a final salute or something. You're letting the energy that was patterned into this architecture that we are out back to be transformed into something else. Yeah, it's like it is really pretty. Yeah, yeah. Thank you to Nerocia Marugin. You can find her at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. This episode was produced by Sarakari with help from me. It was fact checked by Natalie Middleton. For those of you who are going to go check out that life flash video, one thing to note. You're going to see a big flash of light in the video. That is not the bio photons. That is a fluorescent dye that researchers added to the experiment so they could see it better, but beneath that dye. The thing that it's very much illuminating is a very quiet, gentle light. And I'd like to dedicate this episode to my dad. I did not see a flash of light. I certainly felt one. I'm going to miss your pops. Thanks for always listening. This is Radiolab. We will be back next week. Hi, I'm Bridget. And I'm in Chatham Strait in Southeast Alaska on a fishing boat. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lachith Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Rebecca Lacks, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Indu Nyanasambhadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Nisen, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anise Viet, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young. With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Ana Pujo Matini, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Les calling from Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Fundational support for Radiolab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The organization can join in at sponsorship.wnyc.org.