Nirosha (Narosha/Nirosha) Murugan (guest/researcher)
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I'm Narosha Murugan, an applied biophysicist from Waterloo, Canada.
I'm on the other end, who likes to be 50-50.
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.
How quickly that information of me burning my hand went into my body for me to remove my hand.
Things had to change and move all the way back down my arm for me to remove it.
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 for them to interact, there needs to be a physical interaction of that protein into the receptor.
That's the fundamental basis of biomolecular interactions.
But thinking about all that for that one specific molecule to find that perfect receptor just seemed like it was too easy.
So that's exactly, that's the model that didn't sit well with me.
So imagine you're one of those like janitors with like 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 got to try, iterate through random probability and get the right shape in the right space.
This is what I was like uncomfortable with is...
Think of that time and think of the probability of you finding your shape in one thousandth of a second.
And so if you kind of break it down that way, and that's what I learned in school, things weren't adding up.
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?
And he said, I don't know, but this is how it works.
Like, you know, I'm that annoying grad student.
But like, can you tell me a little bit more?
was enough for me to figure out maybe I can go find out that I don't know.
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 the
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?
It is the fastest modality that exists in our universe.
And then you go out, or what I did is went out to research to see if anyone else has asked those questions and how they test them.
And through my research, I found the original papers that showed that biology emits light.
It was the very first instance that someone thought, hey, biology emits light.
What we now know is every cell in your body does give off light.
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.
Literally everything that is alive emits light.
It's because the intensity of light is so weak.
And, you know, 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 in a dish, any cell in a dish, it will give off light.
And we now know very confidently that it's wavelength specific.
Different rates of metabolism will induce different wavelengths of light, so in different colors.
So the intensity of light is definitely not as bright as some of the aura pictographs that you might see.
For us to detect it, we have to have an ultra dark room and use these high sensitive detectors to even detect one photon.
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.
My hypothesis is that most of it kind of comes down to the mitochondria.
So in that process, the electron goes from a high energy all the way down to a low energy state.
So during that hop, it releases energy, which is light.
If the electron doesn't make it, there should be no light, right?
So if you take a dish of brain cells from a rat, if it's just at rest, just doing nothing, really, you probably get around 100 photons a second.
When you add a dish of brain cells, like how many brain cells?
And then when you activate them, we get signals anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 photons a second.
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...
When I presented this as a graduate student at a conference, it was awful.
I presented our first, because I was really excited about this, so I wanted to incorporate this into my graduate thesis.
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.
Now the resistance is, okay, 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, okay, 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?
So I was thinking, okay, 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, okay, before I understand internal light,
You were just like, how are we interacting with external light?
Does any of that apply to the internal light we're making?
For example, there are these proteins called opsins 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 element.
I mean, if you go to any literature, the first thing that will come up is vitamin D synthesis.
And it hits your skin and your skin processes vitamin D and, you know, that does a lot of things for metabolism.
So you're saying like my skin is working with the sun.
The vitamin D precursors absorb a certain wavelength from the sun.
Oh my God, I never thought of us as so plant-like.
Yeah, we are essentially like energetic converters converting sunlight into energy for our life.
Our pigment cells, like, you know, the melanocytes, the hemoglobin that carries the oxygen within your red blood cell absorbs light.
There are a lot more and we're starting to see more and more as people start to look at interactions with light, we can see that molecules have inherent abilities to absorb light.
My hypothesis is that the cell generating light is purposeful, but we don't have the evidence to strongly say yes or no.
So I think, yeah, there's some like a lot more questions to be asked.
I mean, and then the next question, if this light that's coming off of these mitochondria, if it's purposeful...
How is it getting from point A to point B in the cell?
So like photons, when it gets released, it's not like I'm going this direction.
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?
And what is the biology that would support that?
And there is some evidence suggesting that maybe the cytoskeleton is a means to guide photons.
It's the skeleton, the scaffolding of the cell.
It's specifically made up of various proteins.
And one of our interests within this scaffold is called microtubules.
They're the ones that help create that shape of the cell.
Because if we look at images of a cell, you can actually see mitochondria really, really close to the 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
I mean, and that's how things move within the cell.
It's not just like random blobs floating around.
I mean, it sounded like everything was floating.
They're called kinesins and dinesins, but...
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.
And so what we're testing right now is a series of experiments to see if the microtubule is that biological fiber optic cable.
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.
Well, it's the same kind of question we can, what kind of information does electricity carry?
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 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 we use to carry information.
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?
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?
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 mitochondria.
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 accumulation of molecules and mutations.
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 versus not injected.
You can tell within day one that there's something, there's cancer there.
And there was 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.
So in that paper, I think the initial study was to just look at these different kinds of detectors when an animal was alive and dead.
And the photon signatures obviously dissipate when the animal dies.
What that study didn't look at, which you alluded to, is when.
When in that timescale does this signature end?
For example, in hospice care, people report this death flash.
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 OR lights everywhere.
That's where I initially heard it and I looked into it a little bit.
And there's hospice nurses that have anecdotally mentioned this.
Why would there be a big explosion of light you could suddenly see?
Well, when things die, there's a sudden release of these electrons.
They're not being propagated into certain proteins, right?
And so when you have high energy photons dissipating, release is late.
When the system, yeah, that goes back to like physics.
When there's no organization from biology, that energy has to go somewhere.
I think biology, these biomolecules, the membrane, all of these stuff inside of cells help organize that energy into meaningful processes.
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.
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.
Type in, I don't know, calcium life flash.