THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS CONFERENCE

April 25-30, 2016 - Tucson

Pre-Conference Workshop - optional          

Monday, April 25, 9 am to 1 pm

 

QUANTUM BIOLOGY AND NATURE OF LIFE

Stuart Kauffman, Jack A. Tuszynski, Katherine T. Peil, Travis Craddock, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Stuart Hameroff, Dean Radin

                  Stuart Hameroff Headshot   

Kauffman             Tuszynski              Peil                        Craddock                Bandyopadhyay            Hameroff                Radin

 

Functional quantum effects occur in plant photosynthesis, bird navigation, and brain microtubules. As consciousness (thus far at least) occurs only in living systems, one may ask ‘What is life?’, how essential are quantum processes to its origin and evolution, and how do they relate to consciousness and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics?

What is life? Functional definitions fail to capture life’s essence, and vitalist approaches based on electromagnetism were banned from science in the 19th century. More recently Erwin Schrodinger suggested life may involve quantum coherence in periodic lattices, and Herbert Frohlich proposed oscillating biomolecular dipoles condense to unitary quantum states. Such proposals were dismissed as biology was considered too ‘warm, wet and noisy’ for seemingly delicate quantum effects to have functional traction. But in recent years plants have been shown to utilize quantum coherence in photosynthesis in warm sunlight, Frohlich coherence has been demonstrated in room temperature enzyme lattices, and quantum resonances shown in microtubules.

If quantum biology is at play in living systems, what are its implications for consciousness, evolution, cancer and developmental biology, the origin of life and the future of medicine?      


Stuart Kauffman

Quantum criticality in biomolecules, poised realm between classical and quantum regimes


Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Alan Kauffman MD is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago 1969-1973, National Cancer Institute 1973-1975, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he served as Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987–1992. He also holds an Honorary Degree in Science from the University of Louvain; and was awarded a Gold Medal of the Accademia Lincea in Rome. Kauffman proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction. Reproducing peptide, DNA, and RNA collectively autocatalytic sets have now been made experimentally. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits. His hypotheses stating that cell types are attractors of such networks, and that genetic regulatory networks are "critical" have found experimental support. Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on models in various areas of biology. These included autocatalytic sets in origin of life research, gene regulatory networks in developmental biology, and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. Kauffman holds the founding broad biotechnology patents in combinatorial chemistry and applied molecular evolution.      continued.... TSC Plenary 2016-S. Kauffman


Jack A. Tuszynski PhD

Overview of microtubules, models of microtubule information processing, tubulin C termini dynamics, ion conductance along and through microtubules, exciton hopping, microtubule pharmacology and cancer

Jack A. Tuszynski PhD
Departments of Physics and Experimental Oncology; University of Alberta and Cross Cancer Institute - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D. serves as a Member of Scientific Advisory Board of OncoVista Innovative Therapies, Inc. (also known as Oncovista, Inc.). Mr. Tuszynski was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics of the Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1983 to 1988, and at the University of Alberta Physics Department from 1988 to 1990. He joined the University of Alberta Physics Department in 1993. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Physics. Prof. Tuszynski received his M.Sc. with distinction in Physics from the University of Poznan (Poland) in 1980. He received his Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Calgary in 1983. He holds a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary Chemistry Department in 1983.


Katherine T. Peil

‘Quantum hedonism’ - The primacy of emotions in life, evolution and human behavior


Travis Craddock, PhD 

Memory encoding in microtubules (CaMKII phosphorylation), microtubules and Alzheimers disease, conduction pathways (‘quantum channels’), tryptophan excitations, anesthetic binding.

Travis Craddock, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Psychology, Computer Science and Medicine applying systems biology and biophysics methods towards the purpose of identifying novel treatments for complex chronic illness involving neuroinflammation.  His postdoctoral work was conducted under the supervision of Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., in the Broderick Laboratory for Clinical Systems Biology in the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. His work with Gordon Broderick, Ph.D., focused on using a theory driven systems biology approach to investigate neuroendocrine-immune interaction dynamics in neuroinflammation and its relation complex diseases such as Gulf War Illness, and chronic fatigue syndrome. This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.   Travis received his BSc. in co-op physics from the University of Guelph and went on to finish a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of biophysics at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D.  His graduate research activities focused on subneural biomolecular information processing, and nanoscale neuroscience descriptions of memory, consciousness and cognitive dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Areas of Academic Focus:


Anirban Bandyopadhyay PhD

Nanotech stimulation and recording of multiple electron conductances

(kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz resonances) from single microtubules

at ambient temperature, fractal frequencies, non-local coupling, neuronal

microtubule bundle dynamics and initiation of action potentials


Stuart Hameroff MD

The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ theory of consciousness, role of OR-mediated

feelings in the origin and evolution of life (from Primordial Soup to the human brain),

brain ultrasound (megahertz vibrational) effects on mood, mental states and cognitive function.

Stuart Hameroff Headshot
Stuart Hameroff MD

Center for Consciousness Studies


TSC Plenary 2016-Hameroff


Dean Radin PhD

Consciousness and the double slit experiment.

How does consciousness collapse the wave function?

Dean Radin PhD
Chief Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences

TSC Plenary 2016-Radin

 


 

QUANTUM BIOLOGY AND NATURE OF LIFE

Pre-Conference Workshop - Optional          

Monday, April 25, 9 am to 1 pm

Stuart Kauffman, Jack A. Tuszynski, Katherine T. Peil, Travis Craddock, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Stuart Hameroff, Dean Radin

 

Optional - Pre-Conference Workshops

Workshops are held:  Monday/Tuesday, April 25 - 26

Monday Morning 9-1:  Monday Afternoon 2-6

Monday Evening 7-10 and Tuesday Morning 9-1

half day and evening Workshops

Early Workshop Fees:

TSC General Registrants                $60 half day

TSC Student Registrants                $40 half day

General Public - Workshop only  $125 half day

General Public - Student - Workshop only $75 half day