A review published in the journal Protein Science by researchers at Howard University's Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) lays out what its authors call "Quantum Biology 2.0," a reframing of how quantum processes are studied in living things, Mirage News reports. The paper argues that the field has moved away from earlier laboratory work on isolated cells and tissue and toward an approach that treats whole biological systems as integrated wholes. The review is dated September 23, 2026, and was reported from Washington, DC.
The authors describe a field whose questions have widened. Rather than asking only whether fragile quantum effects can survive inside warm, wet organisms, the review points to a research agenda spanning enzyme catalysis, evolutionary behavior, and mapping below the level of the neuron, including how living systems interact with electromagnetic fields down to very weak or single-photon signals.
Why it matters
For decades, a common assumption held that the messy, turbulent conditions of life would quickly destroy quantum effects. The QBL review joins a body of work that has been revisiting that assumption, particularly around decoherence and the part protein environments may play in sustaining excitonic coherences through structured vibrations.
According to Mirage News, the review's central claim is that this shift in perspective gives biologically trained scientists a clearer framework for studying quantum processes across living systems. Dr. Philip Kurian, the laboratory's principal investigator and founding director, said his group's detection of superradiance in solvated protein fibers at thermal equilibrium opens a new window on the role of quantum processes across what he called the web of life.
Proteins as nanoantennas
Kurian traced part of the argument to older physics. He noted that since the 1950s, when the maser was developed, it has been understood that phonons, much like photons in a laser, can concentrate in particular vibrational modes of complex molecules such as proteins. In his description, vibrating proteins carrying large dipole moments behave like nanoantennas in solution, coordinating structure, function, and behavior through electrodynamic means. He added that signals of this kind are not exponentially screened by the counterions common in biological settings, a point he linked to James Clerk Maxwell.
The review also includes a primer on superradiance, the phenomenon in which photons are shared coherently among a group of atoms or molecules, producing faster emission. The effect was first predicted by physicist Robert Dicke in 1954, and Mirage News reports that it took seven decades before it was observed in protein fibers. A QBL-led team predicted and then experimentally detected its signatures in protein fiber networks in 2024, according to the report.
The authors describe these fiber networks as important pathways in all neurons and in higher organisms that lack a brain. They suggest the finding could open research directions relevant to whole-brain emulation and to diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative disease. The primer discusses superradiance across systems ranging from viruses to photosynthetic nanotubes and a variety of protein fibers.
A century of roots
The review situates the field in a long history. Mirage News reports that its origins reach back roughly a hundred years, to the 1920s, when Niels Bohr reflected in lectures and articles on the relationship between light and life. In the same decade, Alexander Gurwitsch observed that radiation emitted by onion roots, which he called mitogenic radiation, could trigger cell division in root specimens kept at a distance. With modern single-photon detectors, such low-intensity signals became known as ultraweak photon emissions, a continuing research area for reading the electromagnetic signatures of metabolizing organisms. These emissions arise from ordinary metabolism and from stress-related pathways, as excited free radicals such as reactive oxygen species relax.
Erwin Schrödinger also took up the question. His 1944 book What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, as Mirage News notes, examined how thermodynamics and quantum mechanics would constrain heredity in a living organism and stirred interest across several scientific fields. That work helped inspire the search for the DNA double helix, whose structure was determined from X-ray crystallography data in 1953, less than a decade later.
Dr. Judith Klinman, professor emerita of chemistry and biochemistry and biophysics at UC Berkeley, who was not involved in the review, praised how it made the case for quantum biology to the protein science community. She said it is difficult to convey enough depth while covering the wide range of topics needed to understand quantum effects in proteins and living systems, and that the Kurian group has set out a compelling research agenda for the coming decade and beyond.
The review's framing also draws a parallel with the wider quantum field. Mirage News notes that 2025 marked the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and that recent advances in quantum information science have led researchers to separate the first quantum revolution, which produced lasers and transistors in the 1950s and 1960s, from "Quantum 2.0" work such as quantum teleportation, quantum key distribution, and noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. Quantum biology, in the authors' view, is now due for a similar update.
What to watch is whether the superradiance findings in protein fibers attract follow-up experimental work, particularly in neuroscience and disease research, and how the broader research program the review proposes takes shape among protein scientists.
