Anita Goel (MD, PhD): unifying physics, biology & consciousness
"for me, the scientific quest and the spiritual quest are the same"
For Anita, physics is a contemplative practice and meditation an empirical inquiry into the same reality. As such, she asks if physics could be reformulated to acknowledge life and the primacy of consciousness.
Anita has been named among MIT Technology Review's top 35 innovators. She holds a doctorate in physics from Harvard, an MD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and a BS in physics with honours from Stanford, where her mentors included Nobel laureates Dudley Herschbach and Steven Chu.
In this dialogue with Bernardo we'll invite discussion on:
- Open systems, why 20th-century physics, built for closed systems, may be structurally blind to life and mind.
- The double-slit in the living cell, her experimental programme probing quantum effects in the machinery of life
- Matter, energy and information, is reality better understood as information with meaning?
Anita is a pioneer of nanobiophysics — studying how molecular nanomachines read and write information into DNA, and whether quantum mechanics plays a "nontrivial" role in their dynamics. She has been named among MIT Technology Review's top 35 innovators, holds over 75 patents, has published in Nature and PNAS, testified before the US Senate, and advised President Obama's science council.
Anita appeared alongside George Harrison, Ravi Shankar and Deepak Chopra in Awake, the documentary on Paramahansa Yogananda — the yogi who taught that meditation is itself a laboratory, and that truth must be verified by direct experience, not accepted on faith. In that spirit, Anita treats physics as contemplative practice and contemplation as empirical inquiry.
In preparation, you might enjoy her interview with Essentia Foundation.
