Dr. Anita Goel: Quantum effects in living systems?
"will be one of the most revolutionary scientific findings over the past couple of centuries" - Bernardo Kastrup on Dr. Anita Goel's work
This is one of those newsletters that makes me most nervous and excited: introducing a visionary scientist (Bernardo is betting she'll win a Nobel Prize), whilst trying to communicate some of their ideas in a way that is both accurate and accessible.
Trained in both medicine and physics at Harvard, Dr. Anita Goel (MD, Phd) is now probing life's biggest questions by investigating its smallest scales. What is the difference between living and inert matter, and do we need a new physics to explain it?
Whenever a strand of DNA in your body is copied, the work is done by a tiny molecular machine called a polymerase.
Dr. Goel’s previous work already demonstrated that the environment can affect its function. But her next experiments may show polymerases even harness non-trivial quantum effects. If confirmed, it could indicate that they operate like tiny quantum computers, which might help explain their incredible efficiency.
From Science to Philosophy and back
Whilst these quantum effects are not yet confirmed, this experiment would sit in the realm of rigorous, empirical science.
But much of this conversation centred on the philosophical implications and the intuitions guiding this work:
Dr. Goel cautiously speculates that this experiment could open a Pandora's Box of questions that physics has ignored for almost 100 years. A period of time when physicists were encouraged to “shut up and calculate.”
For example, the conventional Darwinian perspective is that evolution is a natural selection of random mutations that happen to favour survival.
But if information from the environment is influencing how DNA is copied, it would reopen the door to a Lamarckian perspective: Evolution isn’t just passively constrained by the environment, it actively responds to it.
More speculative still, perhaps these quantum-level dynamics in living systems are detectable signatures of a more fundamental informational substrate.
Anita repeatedly emphasises: this is an intuition, not something that has been demonstrated.
But it comes at a timely moment in human history - AI is now forcing science to confront life's biggest questions once more:
- What is consciousness?
- What distinguishes living matter from inert matter?
- Can it be created?
It was such a privilege to be on the front row of this conversation, and I look forward to reading your reflections in the comments below.
With appreciation!
Amir
We also discussed:
- The value of philosophy & science and their relationship
- The US Government's UAP Science Advisory Council
- Potentials for a consciousness first physics
- The accelerated learning in our culture
- Comparisons with ideas proposed by Michael Levin, Hameroff-Penrose, Federico Faggin
About Dr. Anita Goel
Named one of the World’s “Top Science and Technology Innovators” by MIT Technology Review and one of the “World’s Most Influential Visionaries in Biotech” by Scientific American, Dr. Goel has collaborated very closely with multiple Nobel Prize winners in her bold foray into the uncharted waters between physics and biology.
Dr. Anita Goel, MD, PhD, is a physicist, physician-scientist, inventor, and deep tech pioneer in the field of nanobiophysics. As Founder, Chairman, CEO, and Scientific Director of the Nanobiosym Research Institute and Incubator, she is advancing new theoretical frameworks and experimental methods for elucidating the physics of life and living systems.
Inspired by Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, Dr. Goel’s research is driven by a fundamental question: What physical principles distinguish inert matter from systems that self-organize, process information, and exhibit life, intelligence, sentience, or some combination thereof?
Using DNA-processing molecular nanomachines as experimentally tractable information-processing systems, Dr. Goel studies how living matter reads and writes information at the single-molecule level. Her research spans a continuum from nanobiophysics to quantum-scale phenomena. She examines how mechanical forces, electromagnetic fields, and potentially non-trivial quantum effects shape molecular dynamics.
As the Chairman and CEO of Nanobiosym Diagnostics (NBSDx), Dr. Goel is commercializing some of her nanophysics and digital diagnostics innovations.
She has been recognized globally by prestigious honors including 3 DARPA Breakthrough Awards, 2 USAID Grand Challenge Awards, NASA’s Galactic Challenge Award (with Elon Musk’s SpaceX), the first-ever XPRIZE awarded in healthcare, and multiple awards from the DOD, DOE, AFOSR, NSF, DHHS, and FDA. Dr. Goel is the inventor on multiple patents worldwide and has published in leading scientific journals like Nature Nanotechnology , Scientific American, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additionally, Dr. Goel has been featured in 2 films: i) “Awake: The Life of Yogananda"(2014), about the life and teachings of the man who introduced yoga to the West, where she discusses the science behind yoga and meditation; and ii) “Quantum Convergence: The New Science of Consciousness” (2025), where she appears alongside Nobel Laureates Roger Penrose and the Dalai Lama and discusses how our current 20th century physics does not yet adequately describe life, living systems, and consciousness.
Dr. Goel has also served as an expert on the U.S. Senate for the $1.5 billion National Nanotechnology Initiative; an Advisory Council to the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on its Strategy for American Innovation; as Board Member on the Triennial Review Board of the National Academy of Sciences; as a Member of the Committee on Manufacturing Innovation of the National Academy of Engineering; and as an Advisory Council Member for CIFAR.
Dr. Goel holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Physics from Harvard University, an MD from the Harvard-MIT Joint Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) at Harvard Medical School, and a BS in Physics with Honors & Distinction from Stanford University.
In addition to the conversation with Bernardo below, you might enjoy Anita's interview with Essentia Foundation:
Timestamps
0:00:00 Introduction
0:05:20 Unifying physics & biology
0:10:30 Could life harnessing quantum effects?
0:13:50 Could physics start with consciousness?
0:18:17 Links to Micheal Levin
0:21:30 Is evolution random or responsive?
0:37:00 Cultural constraints on science
0:41:40 Teasing out signatures of underlying informational field
0:42:00 Their new companies & technologies
0:57:00 Science paradigm shift towards life/consciousness
1:07:00 UAP Science Advisory Council: Anita's role
1:17:40 Accelerated learning in culture
1:23:00 Difference with Hameroff-Penrose
1:30:00 Federico Faggin
1:33:00 Qbism interpretation of quantum mechanics
1:37:00 Science / philosophy strengths & limits
1:44:00 Religion, meditation & empiricism
1:49:00 Becoming aware you are awareness
