A landmark event was the publication in 1944 of Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life? Six decades later, the question remains unanswered. Although biological processes are increasingly well understood at the biochemical and molecular biological level, from the point of view of fundamental physics life remains deeply mysterious. Schrödinger himself drew inspiration from his seminal work on quantum mechanics, which had so spectacularly explained the nature of matter, believing it was sufficiently powerful and remarkable to explain the nature of life too. These dreams have not been realized. To be sure, quantum mechanics is indispensable for explaining the shapes, sizes and chemical affinities of biological molecules, but for almost all purposes scientists go on to treat these molecules using classical ball-and-stick models. Life still seems an almost magical state of matter to physicists; furthermore, it's origin from non-living chemicals is not understood at all.

In recent years, circumstantial evidence has accumulated that quantum mechanics may, as Schrödinger hoped, indeed cast important light on life's origin and nature. In October 2003, the US space agency NASA convened a workshop at the Ames Laboratory in California, the leading astrobiology institution, devoted to quantum aspects of life.  The workshop was hosted by Ames astrobiologist Chris McKay and chaired by Paul Davies. In this volume we shall solicit essays both from the participants in the workshop, and from a wider range of physical scientists who have considered this theme, including those who have expressed skepticism. The over-arching question we shall address is whether quantum mechanics plays a non-trivial role in biology.

We believe it is timely to set out a distinct quantum biology agenda. The burgeoning fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum technology and quantum information processing are now strongly converging. The acronym BINS, for Bio-Info-Nano-Systems, has been coined to describe the synergetic interface of these several disciplines. The living cell is an information replicating and processing system that is replete with naturally-evolved nanomachines, which at some level require a quantum mechanical description. As quantum engineering and nanotechnology meet, increasing use will be made of biological structures, or hybrids of biological and fabricated systems, for producing novel devices for information storage and processing, and other tasks. An understanding of these systems at a quantum mechanical level will be indispensable.

To broaden the discussion, we propose to include articles on "artificial quantum life," a rapidly-developing topic of interest in its own right, but also because it may cast light on real biological systems. Related mathematical models will include quantum replication and evolution, von Neumann's universal constructors for quantum systems, semi-quantum cellular automata and evolutionary quantum game theory.

Finally, we propose to include the transcripts of two debates:

(i) "Dreams versus reality: quantum computing" hosted by the Fluctuations and Noise symposium held in Santa Fe, USA, 1-4 June 2003. The panelists were Carlton M. Caves, Daniel Lidar, Howard Brandt, Alex Hamilton (for) and David Ferry, Julio Gea-Banacloche, Sergey Bezrukov and Laszlo Kish (against). The debate chair was Charles Doering.

(ii) "Quantum effects in biology—trivial or not?" hosted by the Fluctuations and Noise symposium held in Gran Canaria, Spain, 25-28 May 2004. The panelists were Paul Davies, Derek Abbott, Stuart Hameroff, Anton Zeilinger (for) and Jens Eisert, Sergey Bezrukov, Hans Frauenfelder and Howard Wiseman (against). The debate Chair was Julio Gea-Banacloche.

Publisher: Imperial College Press

Author Instructions

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5. If you are using LaTeX please put index labels throughout your text then simply use the command "\makeindex" to automatically generate an index at the end of your chapter. This will then be intgrated by us into the master index of the whole book.

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8. At the bottom of this website we are collecting useful references that may assist the authors. If you have any pdf files of interest, feel free to email them to Derek Abbott and they will be posted on this website, so we can build up a "soft library" of these documents for all the authors to share.

9. The drop dead date for finishing this project and checking the publisher's galley proof is: by 30th June 2007.

Table of Contents

Forward: Sir R. Penrose (University of Oxford, UK)

Email: rouse@maths.ox.ac.uk
URL: http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/perl/personal-details.pl?query=rouse

• Penrose_draft1 (pdf)
• Penrose_draft2 (pdf)

Sir Roger Penrose FRS OM was born in England, in Colchester, August 8, 1931. His mother was a medical doctor, and his father was a medical geneticist. Roger was on a path to become a doctor, but his high school did not allow him to take both mathematics and biology. He had to chose one, and he could not bring himself to give up mathematics. He then went on to graduate with a BSc in mathematics from University College London. He then obatained a PhD at Cambridge in the area of algebraic geometry, under John A. Todd. Whilst at Cambridge he attended a number lecturers outside of his primary studies including Paul Dirac's course on quantum mechanics. These together with prompting from Dennis Sciama, led to his interest in Physics. This led to a series of papers on general relativity, black holes, twistor theory, spin networks, and quantum gravity.He has held a number of academic positions inclding those at Cambridge, Princeton, Birkbeck College, and he is presently Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. He is the receipient of numerous wawrds including the Dirac Medal, the Royal Society Medal, and the Eddington Medal.

Preface:

• Preface_draft1 (pdf)

Section 1: Emergence & Complexity

Chapter 1: P.C.W. Davies (Macquarie University, Australia)

"Life and the emergence of quantum complexity"

Email: Paul.Davies@asu.edu
URL: http://cosmos.asu.edu/

• Davies_draft1 (pdf)
• Davies_draft2 (pdf)

Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist. He held academic appointments at the Universities of Cambridge, London and Newcastle upon Tyne before moving to Australia in 1990, first as Professor of Mathematical Physics at The University of Adelaide, and later as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he helped establish the NASA-affiliated Australian Centre for Astrobiology. In September 2006, he joined Arizona State University as College Professor and Director of a new interdisciplinary research institute called Beyond, devoted to exploring the "big questions" of science and philosophy. Davies's research has been mainly in the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime, with applications to the very early universe and the properties of black holes, although he is also an expert on the nature of time. His astrobiology research has focused on the origin of life; he was a forerunner of the theory that life on Earth may have originated on Mars. Davies is the author of several hundred research papers and articles, as well as 27 books, including The Physics of Time Asymmetry and Quantum Fields in Curved Space, co-authored with his former PhD student Nicholas Birrell. Among his recent popular books are How to Build a Time Machine and The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the universe just right for life? (U.S. edition entitled Cosmic Jackpot). He writes frequently for newspapers, journals and magazines in several countries. His television series "The Big Questions", filmed in the Australian outback, won national acclaim, while his theories on astrobiology formed the subject of a specially commissioned one-hour BBC 4 television production screened in 2003 entitled The Cradle of Life. In addition, he has also devised and presented many BBC and ABC radio documentaries on topics ranging from chaos theory to superstrings. Davies was awarded the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize by the UK Institute of Physics and the 2002 Faraday Award by The Royal Society. In Australia, he was the recipient of two Eureka Prizes and an Advance Australia award. Davies also won the 1995 Templeton Prize for his work on the deeper meaning of science. The asteroid 1992 OG was renamed (6870) Pauldavies in his honour.

Chapter 2: S. Lloyd (MIT, USA) "Quantum origins of complexity"

Email: slloyd@mit.edu
URL: http://www-me.mit.edu/people/personal/slloyd.html

• Lloyd_draft1 (pdf)
• Lloyd_draft2 (pdf)
• Lloyd_draft3 (pdf)
• Lloyd_draft4 (pdf)

Seth Lloyd is a Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on how physical systems process information. He proposed the first design for a quantum computer and has worked with scientists and engineers around to world to construct quantum computers and quantum communication systems. Dr Lloyd is the author of Programming the Universe (Knopf, 2006).

Section 2: Quantum Mechanisms in Biology

Chapter 3: J. McFadden and J. Al-Khalili (University of Surrey, UK)

"Quantum coherence and the search for the first replicator" 

Email: j.mcfadden@surrey.ac.uk   j.al-khalili@surrey.ac.uk
URL: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/
URL: http://www.ph.surrey.ac.uk/npg/jak/jak.html

• McFadden_draft1 (pdf)
• McFadden_draft2 (pdf)
• McFadden_draft3 (pdf)
• McFadden_draft4 (pdf)
• McFadden_draft5 (pdf)

Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey, UK, where he also holds a chair in the public engagement in science. He has published widely in his specialist field of theoretical nuclear physics where he has developed quantum scattering methods to model the structure and properties of light exotic nuclei. He has published several popular science books on a range of topics in physics and is a regular broadcaster on radio and television. He is a fellow of the UK Institute of Physics and a trustee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Chapter 4: Alexandra Olaya Castro, Francesca Fassioli Olsen, Chiu Fan Lee and Neil F. Johnson (University of Oxford, UK)

"Ultrafast quantum dynamics in photosynthesis"

Email: neil.johnson@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
URL: http://www.lincoln.ox.ac.uk/fellows/johnson/

• Johnson_draft1 (pdf)
• Johnson_draft2 (pdf)
• Johnson_draft3 (pdf)
• Johnson_draft4 (pdf)
• Johnson_draft5 (pdf)
• Johnson_draft6 (pdf)

Alexandra Olaya-Castro is currently a Junior Research Fellow in Physics at Trinity College in Oxford. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Physics at Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas and her MSc at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. She obtained her DPhil at Oxford. Her research interests currently focus on entanglement in open systems and quantum coherence in biomolecular complexes.

Francesca Fassioli Olsen is currently a DPhil student in Prof Neil Johnson's group at Oxford University. She obtained her BSc in Physics at Pontificia Universidad Cat olica de Chile. Her research interests are entanglement in open quantum systems and excitation dynamics in photosynthetic membranes.

Chiu Fan Lee is currently a Glasstone Research Fellow at the physics department and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College in Oxford. He obtained his BSc at McGill University, Canada, and DPhil at Oxford University. His research interests lie in the areas of biophysics and theoretical biology.

Neil Johnson is currently a professor of physics at Oxford University. His training in physics consisted of an undergraduate degree at Cambridge University and a PhD at Harvard University. His interests focus around Complexity, and Complex Systems, in the physical, biological and social sciences.

Chapter 5: J. Bothma, J. Gilmore, and R.H. McKenzie (Univ. Queensland, Australia)
"Modelling quantum decoherence in biomolecules"
Email: mckenzie@physics.uq.edu.au
URL: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/mckenzie/

• Bothma_draft1 (pdf)
• Bothma_draft2 (pdf)
• Bothma_draft3 (pdf)

Jacques Bothma is currently an MPhil student in the Physics department at the University of Queensland. He completed his BSc in Physics at the University of Queensland in 2006. His research interests are in the areas of theoretical and experimental biological physics.

Joel Gilmore is a science communicator with the University of Queensland, and coordinator of the UQ Physics Demo Troupe. He completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Queensland in 2007, researching minimal models of quantum mechanics in biological systems.

Ross McKenzie is a Professorial Research Fellow in Physics at the University of Queensland. He was an undergraduate at the Australian National University and completed a PhD at Princeton University in 1988. His research interests are in the quantum many-body theory of complex materials ranging from organic superconductors to biomolecules to rare-earth oxide catalysts.

Section 3: The Biological Evidence

Chapter 6: A. Goel (Harvard University, USA)

"Molecular evolution: a role for quantum mechanics in the dynamics of molecular machines that read DNA"

Email: goel@physics.harvard.edu
URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~goel/

• Goel_draft1 (pdf)
• Goel_draft2 (pdf)
• Goel_draft3 (pdf)

Anita Goel holds both a PhD in Physics from Harvard University and an MD from the Harvard-MIT Joint Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and BS in Physics from Stanford University. She was named in 2005 as one of the worlds top 35 science and technology innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review Magazine. Dr. Goel is the Chairman, and Scientific Director of Nanobiosym Labs and the President and CEO of Nanobiosym Diagnostics, Inc. Dr. Goel also serves as an Associate of the Harvard Physics Department, an Adjunct Professor at BEYOND, a Fellow of the World Technology Network, a Fellow-at-Large of the Santa Fe Institute, and a Member of the Board of Trustees and Scientific Advisory Board of India-Nano, an organization devoted to bridging breakthrough advances in nanotechnology with the burgeoning Indian nanotech sector.

Chapter 7: A. Mershin and D.V. Nanopoulos (Texas A & M, USA)

"Microtubules and the quantum origin of memory: (more) facts and (less) fancy"
Email: dimitri@physics.tamu.edu
URL: http://faculty.physics.tamu.edu/dimitri/home.html

• Mershin_draft1 (pdf)
• Mershin_draft2 (pdf)

Andreas Mershin received his MSci in Physics from Imperial College London (1997) and his PhD in Physics from Texas A&M University (2003) where, under the guidance of D. V. Nanopoulos, he studied the theoretical and experimental biophysics of the cytoskeleton. He performed molecular dynamic simulations on tubulin and after winning an NSF grant initiated wide-reaching, cross-disciplinary collaborations performing experiments utilizing surface plasmon resonance, dielectric spectroscopy and molecular neurobiology to successfully test the hypothesis that the neuronal microtubular cytoskeleton is involved in memory encoding, storage and retrieval in Drosophila. Currently, he is a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Biomedical Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing bioelectronic photovoltaic and chemical sensing applications using membrane proteins integrated onto semiconductors. A patent holder and entrepreneur in the field of biosensors, he is also a co-founder of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' international annual Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Prize for the best scientific question posed by children (www.molecularfrontiers.org).

Dimitri V. Nanopoulos received his BSc in Physics from the University of Athens (1971) and his PhD in High Energy Physics from the University of Sussex (1973). He has been a Research Fellow at CERN, at Ecole Normale Superieure and at Harvard University. In 1989, he was elected professor (Department of Physics, Texas A&M University) where since 1992 he is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and since 2002 holds the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics. He is also Head of the Astroparticle Physics Group at the Houston Advanced Research Center. He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology working on string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and
quantum-inspired models of brain function. With over 550 original papers and 31,000 citations he has been ranked 4th most cited high energy physicist of all time by the Stanford University Census. A fellow of the American Physical Society since 1988 he was elected a member of the Academy of Athens in 1997 and became President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology as well as the National representative of Greece to CERN in 2005. He has received numerous awards and honors including the Onassis International prize.

Chapter 8: V.A. Parsegian (NIH, USA)

"Vacuum fluctuations, van der Waals forces and biology"

Email: ap51u@nih.gov
URL: http://www.nih.gov/sigs/SBC/ospec/parsegian.html

• Late chapter. Please submit asap or it will get chopped.

Chapter 9: L. Demetrius (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany, and Harvard University, USA)

"Quantum metabolism and allometric scaling relations in biology"

Email: ldemetr@oeb.harvard.edu

• Demetrius_draft1 (pdf)
• Demetrius_draft2 (pdf)
• Demetrius_draft3 (pdf)

Lloyd Demetrius was educated at Cambridge University, England and the University of Chicago, USA. His present research interests include the application of Ergodic theory and dynamical systems to the study of evolutionary processes in biology . He has been on the mathematics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley , Brown University and Rutgers. His current affiliations are the Max Planck Institute for molecular genetics, Berlin, and Harvard University.

Chapter 10: J.D. Bashford and P.D. Jarvis (Univ. Tasmania, Australia)

"Spectroscopy of the genetic code"

Email: peter.jarvis@utas.edu.au
URL: http://www.phys.utas.edu.au/physics/Theory/Staff1/PDJ.html

• Bashford_draft1 (pdf)
• Bashford_draft2 (pdf)

Jim Bashford is presently an ice sheet data analyst at the Australian Government Antarctic Division. He graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Adelaide in 2003. Recent research interests have included modelling of codon-amino acid degeneracy, oligomer thermo- dynamics, nonlinear models of DNA dynamics and phylogenetic entanglement.

Peter Jarvis is at the School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Tasmania. His main interests are in algebraic structures in mathematical physics and their applications, especially combinatorial Hopf algebras in integrable systems and quantum field theory. In applications of group theory to physical problems, aside from the work on supersymmetry in the genetic code, recent papers have included applications of classical invariant theory

Chapter 11: A. Patel (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India)

"Towards understandin the origin of genetic languages"
Email: adpatel@cts.iisc.ernet.in
URL: http://hp0.cts.iisc.ernet.in/Personnel/adpatel.html

• Patel_draft1 (pdf)
• Patel_draft2 (pdf)
• Patel_draft3 (pdf)
• Patel_draft4 (pdf)
• Patel_draft5 (pdf)

Apoorva D. Patel is a Professor a the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He obtained his MSc in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and PhD in physics from the Califorbnia Instititute of Technology (Caltech). His major field of work has been the theory of QCD, where he has used lattice guage theory techniques to investigate spectral properties, phase transitions, and matrix elements. In recent years, he has worked on quantum algorithms, and used concepts from information theory to understand the structure of genetic languages.

Section 4: Artificial Quantum Life

Chapter 12: A.K. Pati (Institute of Physics, Orrisa, India) and
Samuel L. Braunstein (University of York, York, UK)

"Can arbitrary quantum system undergo self-replication?"

Email: akpati@iopb.res.in
URL: http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/~akpati/

• Pati_draft1 (pdf)
• Pati_draft2 (pdf)

Arun K. Pati has been a theoretical physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division, BARC, Mumbai, India since 1989, and is currently a visiting scientist at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, India. His research is in quantum information and computation, the theory of geometric phases and its applications, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He is also interested in the quantum mechanics of bio-systems. He has published over 60 papers on these topics and has edited a book on quantum information theory. Pati is the recipient of the India Physics Association Award for Young Physicist of the Year (2000) and the Indian Physical Society Award for Young Scientists (1996). His research has been featured in news items in Nature, Science and many national and international newspapers.

Samuel L. Braunstein joined the University of York, in 2003 and is heading a group in non-standard computation. He is a recipient of the prestigious Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award. He was recently awarded the honorary title of 2001 Lord Kelvin Lecturer. He is editor of three books Quantum Computing, Scalable Quantum Computing and Quantum Information with Continuous Variables and serves on the editorial board of the journal Fortschritte der Physik. He is a Founding Managing Editor of Quantum Information and Computation. He has over 90 papers published in refereed journals. His work has received extensive coverage in prestigious scientific venues such as Science, Nature, Physics Today, New Scientist and daily newspapers around the world.

Chapter 13: A.P. Flitney (University of Melbourne, Australia) and D. Abbott (University of Adelaide, Australia)

"Quantum game of life"

Email: aflitney@physics.unimelb.edu.au dabbott@eleceng.adelaide.au
URL: http://www.users.bigpond.com/adrian_flitney/
URL: http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/

• Flitney_draft1 (pdf)
• Flitney_draft2 (pdf)
• Flitney_draft3 (pdf)

Adrian Flitney completed a Bachelor of Science with first class honours in theoretical physics at the University of Tasmania in 1983. He worked in the field of ionospheric physics and high frequency radio communications for the Department of Science for two years and later for Andrew Antennas Corporation. He was a researcher in quantum field theory in the Physics Department at the University of Adelaide for some time, and worked as a tutor in physics and mathematics both within the University and privately. In 2001 Flitney finally saw the light and began a PhD in the field of quantum information with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide. At the beginning of 2005 he submitted a thesis entitled "Aspects of Quantum Game Theory" and was awarded his doctorate with highest commendation. He is currently worked in the School of Physics, University of Melbourne on quantum games and decoherence under an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. He has authored thirteen peer reviewed publications and presented seven conference papers. Currently Flitney's major non-academic interests are chess, where he has achieved considerable success in the past, and kayaking.

Derek Abbott was born in South Kensington, London, UK. He is with The University of Adelaide, Australia, where he is presently the Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering (CBME). He has served as an editor and/or guest editor for a number of journals including Chaos (AIP), Smart Structures and Materials (IOP), Journal of Optics B (IOP), Microelectronics Journal (Elsevier), Proceedings of the IEEE, and Fluctuation Noise Letters (World Scientific). He is a life Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and Fellow of the Institution of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Prof Abbott is co-founder of two international conference series: Microelectronics in the New Millennium and Fluctuations and Noise.

Chapter 14: A. Iqbal and T. Cheon (Kochi University of Technology, Japan)  

"Evolutionary stability in quantum games" 

• Iqbal_draft1 (pdf)
• Iqbal_draft2 (pdf)
• Iqbal_draft3 (pdf)
• Iqbal_draft4 (pdf)

Azhar Iqbal graduated in Physics in 1995 from the University of Sheffield, UK. From 1995 to 2002 he was associated with the Pakistan Institute of Lasers & Optics. He earned his PhD from the University of Hull, UK, in 2006 in the area of quantum games. He is Assistant Professor (on leave) at the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan and Visiting Associate Professor at the Kochi University of Technology, Japan.

Taksu Cheon graduated in Physics in 1980 from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1985 in the area of theoretical nuclear physics. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Kochi University of Technology, Japan.

Chapter 15: J. Sladkowski (University of Silesia, Poland)

"Quantum transmemetic intelligence"

Email: sladk@as.edu.pl
URL: http://ideas.repec.org/e/psl3.html

Sladkowski_draft1 (pdf)

Sladkowski_draft2 (pdf)

Section 5: The Debate

Chapter 16: Transcript of debate held in Santa Fe, 2003:
"Dreams versus reality: quantum computing"

Dramatis personae: S. Bezrukov (NIH), H. Brandt (Army Research lab), C.M. Caves (Univ. New Mexico), C. R. Doering, (Univ. of Michigan). Gea-Banacloche (Univ. Arkansas), L. Kish (Texas A&M), D. Lidar (Univ. Toronto), D. Ferry (Arizona State University), A. Hamilton (Univ. New South Wales).

Transcript Editor: D. Abbott (Univ. Adelaide)

• Debate1_draft1 (pdf)
• Debate1_draft2 (pdf)

Chapter 17: Transcript of debate held in the Canary Islands, 2004:

"Quantum effects in biology---trivial or not?"

Dramatis personae: D. Abbott (Univ. Adelaide), S. Bezrukov (NIH), P.C.W. Davies (Macquarie Univ.), J. Eisert (Imperial College and Potsdam Univ.), H. Frauenfelder (Los Alamos Labs), S. Hameroff (Univ. Arizona), J. Gea-Bancloche (Univ. Akansas), H. Wiseman (Griffith Univ.), A. Zeilinger (Univ. Vienna).

• Debate2_draft1(pdf)
• Debate2_draft2(pdf)

Chapter 18: H. Wiseman (Griffith University, Australia) and Jens Eisert (Imperial College, UK, and Potsdam Univertsity, Germany)

"Quantum effects in biology: a skeptical physicists' view"

Email: h.wiseman@griffith.edu.au  j.eisert@imperial.ac.uk
URL: http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~s285238/index.html
URL: http://www.ic.ac.uk/people/j.eisert

• Wiseman_draft1 (pdf)
• Wiseman_draft2 (pdf)

Howard Wiseman is a theoretical quantum physicist. His principle interests are quantum measurements, quantum feedback control, quantum information, fundamental questions in quantum mechan ics, and open quantum systems. He completed his PhD with Gerard Milburn at the University of Queensland in 1994, and then undertook a a postdoc with Dan Walls at the University of Auckland. Since 1996 he has held Australian Research Council research fellowships. He is currently Professor and Federation Fellow at Griffith University, where he is the Director of the Centre Quantum Dynamics. He is also a Program Manager in the ARC Centre for Quantum Computer Technology. He has over 120 refereed journal papers, and his awards include the Bragg Medal of the Australian Institute of Physics, the Pawsey Medal of the Australian Academy of Science and the Malcolm Macintosh Medal of the Federal Science Ministry.

Jens Eisert is a lecturer and holder of the prestigeous European Young Investigator Award at Imperial College London in the UK (Diploma, University of Freiburg, Germany; MSc, University of Connecticut, USA; PhD, University of Potsdam, Germany). His research interests are in quantum information science and related fields: This includes formal aspects of entanglement theory and computational models, as well as quantum optical implementations and the study of complex quantum systems.

Chapter 19: S. Hameroff (University of Arizona, USA)

"Life and the quantum/classical boundary"

Email: hameroff@u.arizona.edu
URL: http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/

• Hameroff_draft1 (pdf)

Stuart Hameroff MD is an anesthesiologist and Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. He has teamed with Sir Roger Penrose to develop the "Orch OR" (orchestrated objective reduction) model of consciousness based on quantum computation in brain microtubules, and has also researched the action of anesthetic gases. As Director of the University of Arizona's Center for Consciousness Studies, Hameroff organizes the biennial "Tucson conferences" Toward a Science of Consciousness, among other Center activities. His website is www.quantumconsciousness.org