0:00 So excited to share some of the work that we've done the the trajectory that I've taken to get to this point to ask some of these questions. Um so the title uh sort of represents what we're going to talk about today beyond the molecular model of communication. I'm trying to understand really what uh biological information is and my approaches uh through this idea of uh patterned energetic signals. Um, before we get into the the details of things, I I figured it'd be a good idea to kind of bring into our awareness of where this all came from, how I got excited about all of this. Um, and really what had brought me into science was trying to understand human behavior. Um the reason for that is because as a as a young kid uh looking at humans and and organisms
0:47 of of similar species though that we have subtle differences relatively we have similar structures you know fingers of of patterns of our eyes bodies and our our biology but ultimately we think differently we heal differently we experience the world around us differently and um all this together I think more of the um collective nature of how we organize into cultures uh our beliefs in our society um is also very different and religion the idea of why we have similar brains, similar functions but how we uh interact with uh each other in sort of the organized rules in the form of of religion has something that has fascinated me for a long time. And so
1:33 with that um uh like in mind I would took some training in uh neuroscience from a behavioral point of view and um some of the psychologists when they try to understand human behavior there is this principle called multiple determinants that there are cognitive factors environmental factors or behavioral factors that determine our behavior and um from my point of view I think all of this is how we integrate whether we're cognition or what's in our environment, what's in our bodies is just a source of information. So, how our behaviors, how we navigate to me is is an exciting um avenue to ask basically two questions that conceptualize what I'm excited about, which is how does information either
2:20 within our bodies or external to our bodies shape different outcomes. So, why is it that we're exposed to the same exact stimuli? uh let's say if we think of a lemon uh we have different experiences different memories even though the stimuli is the same and then if we kind of try to bring this down to a academic or sort of scientific question is what information u is a living system using to decide what to do and I put decide because uh especially with what you've been thinking about what what what does decide mean in terms of a an organism and how does that scale to behavior um so I've tried to uh distill this in a way that makes sense and also that we can ask and answer questions. So um biology in my mind are
3:06 defined by how we process uh energy and information. Um and really every biological system is trying to solve fundamentally two different problems. The first is restricted on the laws of thermodynamics where we're trying to bring in store and deal with dissipating energy uh while trying to be far from equilibrium. And the second in my mind is informational. So the energy part is the thermodynamics and then the information is how do we sense our environment? How do we integrate that signal? And then how do we make decisions that coordinate our behavior. Um so it's a pretty computational kind of perspective where you have inputs, some sort of computation and you have an output. Um, and we have circuitry from a biomolelecular point of view. We have proteins, genomics, and now there's like
3:51 a metabolic circuitry that's coming uh into play here. Um, but one dynamic that hasn't been really looked at that I've been excited about, have been learning is this idea of energy. Is there sort of like an energetic landscape of the circuitry that exists within our body that might be uh agnostic to the modality that we look at? So you see this input, the sensors here. There's light, temperature, cellto cell interactions, molecules. A lot of what we've looked at is on that molecular domain. So um I've drawn inspiration also from plants uh that how they organize uh themselves in terms of what they use as information, how it coordinates their bodies. they are, you know, yes, they can uh transport chemicals and and biomolelecular
4:36 signals, but really organisms like plants and ourselves, we also organize and um respond to electromagnetic information. Um and so within that domain, which I'll talk about in a bit, there's wavelength, there's intensity, there timing, the spatial distribution of those signals, um that really guide behavior and development. So that's the big picture of where kind of got me into from a scientific point of view. What I'm excited about is this source of information that's non-chemical and how do we use that to understand our behavior and our development as part of an example of our behavior. Um so kind of getting into uh learning more about information, learning about you know what the components and compartments are with information before we scale this up
5:22 to biology to see if we can learn anything is we can't talk about information without bringing up uh Shannon um and he has this really um simple framework for how we process how information is processed within a system. uh one must uh send, receive, process this information and the telecommunication network that we've built uh so far has been kind of around this model. Um and animal communication people who've done this work have distilled similar things that an organism has to resend some form of information. The receiving organism has to have the equipment, the structure to receive that modality dependent information. Um and then there must be a dis decision and a response. And then
6:07 you know it's not specific to just a s singular organism. There could be you know another organism around in the environment as long as it has the same architecture. It's also responsive to that same signal. So it's not just organism specific. It's uh uh receiver specific. Um so um if we try or I've tried to kind of bring this into the framework of cellular signaling or cellular communication we have an information source the encoder receiver and destination or what we call the output. It's pretty much similar for what what we understand in molecular biology. The information source is we think is our is our the genetic genetic expression some form of metabolic state um or the state of our neighboring cells. there are transmitters of this
6:53 information. Uh and then there's a receiver or decoder. Um but biology doesn't necessarily work this way because there's these things called noise. There's you know um thermal fluctuations, back black body radiation in the background, mutations, oxidative stress. Um but also one other important thing that I found pretty interesting is looking at molecular biology is that uh the source of the signal could also be the source of noise. So a single molecule can also be the receiver, can also be the sender. Um uh so there's not really a defined label that uh a molecular signal is context specific. Um so this is probably why we have these molecular signaling pathways that one
7:40 gene or one protein can have multitude different of effects. It can carry multiple different um information bearing pathways. So there's that limitation associated with the molecular signaling and then when we think about how signaling typ molecular signaling typically works in an examples for example in morphagens it is an information carrying signal um and typically depending on its concentration uh its dynamics um what it translates to we see that that's associated with the patterning and any disregulation of those uh morphagens or chemicals is associated with mispatterning but From my perspective and other people have thought about this including yourself is um the idea there's multiple challenges with this problem but with this
8:26 perspective one there's thermodynamic constraints of how the energy is dissipated within this environment. Uh you need to have a certain amount of concentration to even elicit a signal within a a system. So there's a low con low there's high stocastic noise. Um it's diffusion dependent right? So a signal is going to only be limited if you look at it strictly from a molecular or chemical point of view. Um and so it minimizes any kind of long range coordination, right? There needs to be a sequence of molecules or it needs to take time for that individual molecule to get to that end destination. So um all of this from a cell biology point of view to me is an incomplete story of how biology communicates. And this is where
9:11 I from my upbringing and training um have been interested in the idea of like what other non-chemical modalities do do they exist within chemical or within um communication. So here is a um a neural network where you are looking at calcium flashes. Um you've seen this obviously many many times. Um but ultimately another way of looking at this same exact image is that cells are also energy processors. the information that they are using within themselves and around themselves could be related to how much energy they're consuming, utilizing or not being flown within each cell. So the information again is not just the molecules. The calcium is not necessarily the only information that's
9:57 being computed here, but how much energy is flowing within this network also could be a form of information that this dynamics is is utilizing. So what I argue and what I'd like to discover is whether there's other patterns of information maybe in the form of energy uh energy modalities that can un be used as a form of communication within the system and I came across this uh this video which kind of illustrates some of the stuff that we just talked about and the idea here is you're looking at uh plants uh that after a damage they're eliciting a a calcium signal. So they're they're encoded with GCamp um a genetically genetically encoded voltage sensor. Um and you damage one part of
10:43 the plant and you see this distribution of this calcium wave across a plant. And if you look at the time scale for a single ion to move across this this space of a plant to cause this wavelike property is in my mind pretty fast. So it kind of brings up this question are cells from one organism to one part of the organism to the other are they using multiple modalities to communicate some sort of signal in this case damage to the leaf. So um something I've been trying to like uh not just abstractly but also like show within the biomolelecular community is that molecules itself are not information. their substrates to carry information and depending on their special
11:29 organization, the tempo dynamics of those molecules and the context in which that they're expressed in is what information is. So it's not the fact that calcium is the information. It's not ATP that's information. It's the dynamics of how calcium flows within the membrane or how much ATP or how little ATP is flowing in and out of the cell. So it's the dynamics that isformational, not necessarily the actual molecular substrate itself. Um so kind of like a intro to what I really am interested in is states of health is how do we use what we understand as information um biological information from its alternative perspective to really understand our health and can we build tools that leverage this dynamics that are you know much faster that have to
12:16 deal with all the stoasticity in our environment and thermodynamic constraints to understand something as dynamic as health which we know is multi-in informational and and complex. Um so related to that I had an opportunity to work with uh Martin Picard on this this idea of is so if if we have energy and information okay and and information doesn't have to be substrate dependent and it could be based on dynamics could then regulating this energy flow within a system beformational to that system and that's where this energy resistance principle kind of was born from the the the resistance to the flow of energy um in a bi biological circuit. Um, is that informationational? Do our cells sense it? And how do they respond to that
13:02 change? And in this case, not in just this case, what we're talking about at the energy flow or energy resistance is the the resistance to the the electrons being pulled from our food sources and getting to that final electron acceptor, the oxygen, and all the other pieces around it. Um so in this paper we kind of talk about elements of what this energy resistance are and I I kind of highlight it here in our in an a very simple equation and this equation is meant to be a heristic. It's not something that is a is a model of what's actually happening inside of the cell but energy resistance which is the restrictive flow of energy into the cell or into the biological organism. how it's uh proportional to the its energy potential, how much uh available
13:48 uh electrons there are to flux or move into the the biological unit um uh to be to be utilized. So um within uh cells and u the mitochondria there are known parameters for these uh for example lactic lactate uh being a parameter of energy resistance. We've uh identified another protein called um growth differentiator factor 15 um uh GDF-15 which is a marker also of energy resistance and how it's in proportion to things like glucose the store that is your energy potential. So if you pull electrons off of that to to produce pyuvate how do those uh sources uh tell us something about how the energy is
14:33 flowing within our body. So this framework to me coming from you know electromagnetic and um bioelectric background feels like a middle ground to understand how energy in the system is being computed and regulated and how we can develop technology to kind of manipulate each parameter so energy could flow. So also in the paper we talk about um how this influences like our day-to-day behavior like um exercising the food that we eat. Um an idea and the main concept here I guess to take away is that the energy flux itself is the signal. So it's not the the concentration of ATP that we learn from KB cycle that that is in the actual mitochondria but how that electron flows
15:19 um deter which we know that can determine cell states and also modulate experience. So how does this scale from the cell to to the the organism? Um but I you know I'm not going to go too much into detail in there but what that framework has done for me is it helped me understand the dynamics of a system. So even in the energy resistance principle we're looking at a discrete signal and every single assay I think we use in biology destroys this idea of dynamics that we're actually interested in. Even if we have a high resolution of RNA sequencing or um whatever param biological parameter that we're trying to look at, there's still going to be a discrete node in that signal that we're going to miss the dynamics. So what
16:05 would be useful is we develop some tool or technology to understand a continuous signal that is actually relevant to what's happening in our biology. Um and a lot of it is a lot of what's happening right now in our understanding of biological communication is limited by the tools that we have. We're looking at it from a molecular perspective. So the tools are discrete analysis of what's happening. Um so what I'm interested in where I think would be very useful to kind of shift our framework is look into something that's dynamic which is the the physics of what's happening inside of cells and tissue and within specifically the electromagnetic spectrum. So that's what I'm interested is um and I'll go into a detail a little bit more. Um specifically what I'm interested in is looking at information within our biological organism and how
16:50 we um utilize that information within the uh um nonionizing range and also within the light range. So if we kind of take this a step further, we need to ask ourselves a a couple of questions. What qualifies as biological information? If we go back to our our Shannon diagram, what is that channel where you take that information that is being sensed and transduced that into a biological behavior and even like at our organismal behavior. So we kind of talk about this in our uh review paper where we look at biohysical signaling from a plasticity and a patterning perspective. So um kind of laying the groundwork of what do we know about how biology computes or
17:38 utilizes biohysical information. Um and for biology to use these physical modalities there needs to be some principles that must be accepted. For one a it has to be generated by living systems. Uh it has to be encoded in some sort of relevant information. uh it has to be transduced, transmitted across and the biology has to detect it and decode it into some sort of behavioral response. Um this logic I feel like applies to molecular chemical signaling. You can kind of take what is generating them, hormones, molecules. Um they're encoded in terms of um meaning encoding a anformational state or a biological state. And then the last part I think which is um pretty useful to think about
18:24 and I I'd like to expand this a little bit more is how we can use these uh biohysical sets to improve prediction of biological state. And what I mean by that is by measuring the signal, it should provide some information beyond what you would expect from just random variation from just random uh expression of the the the that physical signal for example heat or magnetic radiation or or light. Um so that's the idea of what where this should go if if we're going to use biohysical signaling as a meaningful tool to understand information. Um so this is just a summary of uh what we kind of know in those contexts of generated encoded states transmitted detected and what kind of functional evidence that we
19:10 have. Um if we go into the dynamics that I am interested in is biopotonics and electromagnetic fields um we know they're generated we know they're detected. Um I put this here. I don't know if you can see my mouse. I guess not. Can you see my mouse? Yeah. Um so um the this is a is a contention. We know that they're detected. Some people don't think that we're detected from certain parts of our body, but we know that we generate endogenous light. The functional evidence is up for debate. Um and that's kind of the areas that I'm interested in right now. So this is just a lay of the land of when what physical channels are associated with biological uh information and communication. So to contextualize the work that we do kind of need to understand a little bit about
19:57 me where I came from to uh understand uh why I think about these things and the way that I think about these things. So my scientific approach and how I view biology and science is obviously informed by my academic training but also the mentors that have done this work before me and I think around the same vision of how does biology communicate uh uh communicate and make decisions. So in my graduate training in the neuroscience research group in in Canada and Sudbury um the big questions that we were trying to answer as a group is are biological systems generating and responsive to the most important word here is time varying electromagnetic information not just the fact that they're responding to some energetic sort but the idea that it's varying in time and then I met you uh and with you
20:47 I hope to try to understand do bio electric patterns encode information um as a collective about shape. Do they instruct development? Do they bind binds? Um and in both cases um we pursued um the unknown and we challenged long-standing assumptions. The fact that magfields can affect biology, uh the fact that you can control shape using bioelectric modulators are kind of assumptions that wasn't really well accepted. Um so that's the the general framework. Um, do you have any thoughts or questions before I go forward? >> No, no, keep going. It's great. >> Awesome. Um, so I I just to give you a little bit more uh granular detail of what I did in those uh in those parts of my life. Uh, in grad school, again, the
21:34 questions here was, you know, are biological systems generating and are they responsive to electromagnetic information? They're not just furious random energy sources. Um I looked at these in across multiple different domains across human behaviors trying to understand what consciousness is but we won't talk about that here right now. Um but from a by like a hardcore biology I guess perspective uh we were able to induce disruption essentially u dissociate and and blow up pleneria which are set to be immortal using applied magnetic fields. And if you pattern those magnetic fields in a meaningful way to target calcium channels, you can control cancer physiology. So what we're looking at here in the top image is um melan melanoma. Um with just unstimulated,
22:21 they look like this. But when they're stressed out, they start producing melanin. And you can kind of change their physiology to stop growing. And we've done that in animals. And then we can alter brain function by applying uh light in a patterned way. um um that which at the time photobiomodulation wasn't a a large phenomenon. So here is just to kind of show the three different dimensions in which we interacted with the electromagnetic information light um and magnetism. And um what drew me to your lab was really trying to understand that mechanism. Why do magnetic fields interact with biology? what's the control knobs in which magnetic fields um can be can be u targeted in biology
23:06 and really is what's the mechanism um and we didn't get to answer and ask those questions in instead we went down other directions um and really is the bioysics of of other behaviors um kind of emerged and so the questions that u that I was interested in with with you is the idea of regeneration um you So coming from a cancer background, the cancer and regeneration seem to be two sides of the same same coin. And so looking at can we change the informationational landscape of uh a regenerating limb such that there's organized pattern or structure which we were likely able to do and then kind of bringing this to a non neural organism. How does something that doesn't have a brain compute information about its
23:52 environment? And that was pretty exciting. As much as I hated faum, I'm very thankful. It opened up the the door to the idea of mechano sensation. So an organism can compute a physical signal by uh sensing this in its uh environment and transducing it in a way that has is is neural independent. So it doesn't necessarily follow action potentials or what we understand as how our physiology computes information. Um, and then some other projects that were really exciting that uh we we explored but didn't really get to to dig into is the bioelectricity of cancer using um some work with with Patrick and Wanita co-culturing cancer cells and non-cancer cells um and then changing developmental structures in in
24:39 tadpoles by changing their um or reducing their magnetic environment. And then I'm not sure if you remember this but this was quite exciting is if you co-cultured uh two organisms faizer and pleneria together um they uh uh somehow the pleneria which are um uh very hard to keep still um stay still um and and that was quite interesting to to see. So there was quite a lot of freedom to explore this idea of biohysics across model systems um when you're a lab and I've taken all of that to my lab now um which is scary to say that I'm now leading a lab to to build off of what I've learned across both um labs to
25:25 detect and modulate this energetic landscape uh as carriers of of biological information. And if you kind of drill down that into a little bit more detail is how do we detect this and how do we modulate biohysical um communication and the two domains that I'm interested in is using light and magic fields and um some questions that have emerged from this is are these biohysical communication are they quantum at all meaning do they use quantum processes like radical pair mechanism spin chemistry um to elicit this these communications and or can we use quantum technology to modulate this communication or to detect what's happening? Um, and are these signals at all related to the biomolelecular
26:11 domain? So these two questions is what really excites me is what's actually being utilized? How are these communications happening from a from a magnetic point of view or light point of view? And what do they say about the biomolelecular communication or if they say anything at all? Um and so just a couple projects that we've recently started to work on and and put out which illustrates some of these points. Um what we've shown in this study which we just preprinted is to show that magnetic fields weak magnetic fields which usually people will would um ignore carry biologically meaningful effects if you pattern them after biological um uh states. So what we've done here is we focused on long-term potentiation which
26:56 is a process associated with learning and memory in in organisms. We isolated uh cortical neurons, plated them into multi-elerode arrays to assess this question is if you pattern the magnetic field after long-term potentiation, do can you elicit that same effect um that you would typically get if you would um stimulate these neurons with electric fields? and u the preprint that's the the link to it. But essentially what we find is that you can um and not only is it functional so these neurons when they're stimulated with an electric field after a LTP modeled magnetic field they respond like they were stimulated with LTP but there structural changes as well. So there's increased synaptic um
27:43 uh plasticity markers. There's more synapses that are that are generated um suggesting that we've altered the process of long-term potentiation generation just by modeling it um uh with an applied magnetic field. And we've done some controls to make sure that it's the pattern, not just the energy within them by using a sine wave where it's what we call non-informational. it's just energy uh in that point of view and then also a no field control. Um and so we've also done some human studies related to this is when you pattern the magnetic field uh that's supposed to be modeled after some endogenous biological process, can you elicit that behavior? So in these experiments, what we um this is a study that's ongoing is we've developed a
28:29 technology to put over people's heads. uh but also the most important thing is pulsing the pattern um and the pattern that we developed here was after amydaloid uh firing uh within those neurons the firing patterns within amydaloid neurons and the test that we did here is a cold pressure test uh so it's a painful established behavioral test where uh subjects would put their hand in really really cold water and across the experimental paradigm we would either apply a field that it was uh patterned to elicit an analesic response response u a no field uh control pattern control condition or just an experimental control where there's no field at all and um again this is ongoing we have some preliminary promising data that suggests that um
29:16 pattern magnetic fields do affect the brain regions associated with analesia um there in this study we've kind of hooked up these subjects to um systemic signal um detectors as well so heart rate variability skin conductance to see how the whole system responds to brain stimulation. Um, and behaviorally by stimulating the brain with these pulse magnetic fields as supposed to induce analesia, the the treated subjects tolerated this pain response much longer than control um, uh, exposed people. Uh, so again promising. So the idea here is to illustrate the idea. It's not just that magnetic fields as an energetic source that affects biology, but it's the pattern that is uh most responsive to the biology.
30:03 Um so that's the electromagnetic domain. Um I'll just do a quick flip before we finish off. Um what I um had originally talked about is the application of an energetic signal in the form of a pattern magnetic field. What I'm going to talk about now is the detection of electromagnetic signals in the form of light. And we call those biophotons. Um, so it's not a contention anymore that biology emits light. They do. We've called them so many different things across history. Biophotons, autooluminescence, ultraeak photon emission. And the the classifying parameters of what a biophoton is um is that it is not bioluminescent. So it's not generated from a a chemical reaction like um luciferates for example. It's endogenous. Um the intensities of
30:50 biophotons are ultra weak. Uh so what I have here is a picture of a moon on a dim um a dim night. Um the photons that you would see you actually can't see through the naked eye. The spectral distribution is actually within the visible wavelength. There's some contention that there's some biophotons within the UV 200 to 280. um and they are dynamic and they seem to be reflective of biological state. So this is just to show you the types of data that can be acquired based on the tools that we have. Um they're temporal so they're continuous signals of reading out biological state which is something I I'm I talked about in the beginning. If we are going to read health it has to be dynamic. Um and then also this is a really cool study that was done where
31:35 they looked at biopoton emission um during metamorphosis of a caterpillar. So you can see that as it liquefies and starts to repattern itself, there's changes in this endogenous photon emission. And again, it's no longer a question whether biophotons are real. Uh they are emitted depending on various states. So animals that have rheumatoid arthritis and are experiencing uh injury. Uh plants that have been injected with uh viruses, you can see that you know depending on the side that the virus was injected, you can see changes in photon biopoton emission. And then this is really really early work where they showed that as an embryo develops uh and cells divide you get these spikes in photon emissions. Um and what we've done uh which hopefully will
32:21 come out will be submitted soon is a review of the literature on the mamlian side. Can we use light to track health states? So in mung beans and plants it's wonderful but how do we relate this to to human? What does this light mean in the context of our health? And so this is a summary. So it's been shown in various systems of our of our physiology and the the consilient point here is that it seems to be related to oxidative stress. So when you have oxidative stress within the human body there seems to be photon emissions that see are emitted. The question now is what is the pattern? Can we develop a pattern a signature that's state dependent? Um and so we started to do some of this. I did this work in my uh PhD. um and what we've built from now. So we showed in in my PhD that biophotons again can be
33:08 emitted from living cells in the case here from um uh melanoma cells. Since then, I've learned a little bit more about how these emissions are are developed or or emitted, I should say. Some when you're thinking about doing these experiments, you have to think about whether there's antibiotics within your system, whether their cells are adherent or suspension. They change the profile of how these cell these photons are emitted. So then we took these melanoma cells, cultured them and applied different filters to see whether the photons that are being emitted carry any kind of changes in its energy and whether we can tell what the cells are doing based on those energetic signals. Um, and so what we found is that if you took a healthy cell that was transformed, so it is cancer-like but is
33:55 not cancerous, and you took cancer cells themselves, like breast cancer, there seems to be a profile difference in the type of signals, um, photon signals that they're emitting. So this dynamics that we're looking at here is the change in photon emission in those wavelengths over a 22 and a half hour period. And so we've done this across 22 different cell lines uh healthy and non-healthy. And from there we've kind of determined that you can use biopotons as a way to discriminate very very early about within a plate filled with 10,000 cells. That's all you really need to tell whether that plate was cancerous or not. And so we've done this now in in animals um early detection within animals um and we're working towards using this for for
34:42 humans. So where do we go from here? Uh in biopotonics not just from our lab but as a field and if we look at what the state of the field in biophotonics is right now it's again we can measure biophotons from plants to single cells to humans. We have better tools that have lower signal to noise ratio. So you're looking at biopotons here that was done in a classic study by Kobayashi and you can do this in real time. Um what is an you know not really established but open questions and um what I'm really excited about is what's the origin of these biophotons? How are they transported within biology and then how does cells use these biophotons if at all? So they can encode biological state as we shown in our cancer studies but does biology use them in a
35:29 meaningful way? And I I asked this because of this um phenomenon that I found um just by reading uh a literature associated with opsins. So there are obviously these proteins that are receptive or sensitive to light photosensitive but they're not associated with our visual perception. So we know that you know for vision these proteins have to be sensitive to light. But there are these non-visual options OPN3s within very very deep dark what are supposed to be dark environments within internal tissues of our body. So for example in a developing embryo um there are this expression of OPN3s very deep within you know the the uterus and then also within a darkened environment and then also within a develop a brain deep within our own
36:14 brains where we expect to be no light there are these non-visual options that are photosensitive. So the questions that I then kind of and myself and uh others are interested in is are they picking up indogenous light and that's why those photo receptors are there. Biology is very very good at getting rid of unnecessary or not useful things. So if it wasn't useful we would have you know evolved that out. So if we are expressing these um non-visual proteins that are photosensitive is it because the UPS are informative and many people have hypothesized this from 2013 even before that to to very recently is do neurons especially within the brain um generate light? Do they use them to communicate and is that a form of uh
37:00 communication towards repair? So we've developed a research program around this. Um uh one half is to see if light is being generated which we know it needs to be propagated within the brain. So are there any kinds of bioinspired waveguides uh photonic waveguides in our brain that allow this endogenous light to be moved and propagated in a meaningful way like you know action potentials in terms of electricity. What's that photonic signal look like? So on the left here is um is a an experiment that we started doing where we isolate spinal cords where they have aligned axons. Um there's no other um material and we put light through these um spinal cords in these various shapes trying to ask the question that
37:48 the more bends you have. What you're looking at here is we put a fiber optic cable that is able to propagate light. So if biology is able to propagate light, even if you have more bends, the light should end to get to the detector. If it's not propagating and it's just bouncing around, you will get a a a loss of light um throughout those uh chips. So that's an experiment that is ongoing right now. And the other side of this is um can we develop detectors to pick up these light that's coming out of our heads and whether it's meaningful to our brain state? And very big picture, what we've done is yes, light can be recorded from outside of our our heads. And we've developed this a simple experiment by um exposing participants to auditory very
38:34 very annoying sound to elicit a brain change, a response. And uh we published this paper last year where we showed that um compared to background signals where there seems to be a lot of noise and stocastic signaling that when you place these sensors across specific brain regions there seems to be light emissions that carry some meaning of biological state. Um this is um quite exciting um but we want to make sure that we're doing this rigorously. So we're continuing this work in other contexts and in other um uh lab settings to make sure that this is actually biological signal and not just uh random noise. Um so where do we go from here to kind of tie this all together? uh biology, life is fundamentally an
39:20 information process information processing system and I argue that the patterning of energetic signals whether they be magnetic or light or biomectric um is an un underexplored area for communication. So it's not just the modality but the pattern of the weight of that signal. Um and some itching questions that I'm trying to to answer is what conditions um do physical phenomena become biological information. And then you know if I had all the money and all and a magic wand if I could solve this that would be a game changer is can we build a Google translate for biology where we're going to try to understand health or disease by looking at one modality whether it be the chemistry and understanding the magnetic or what are the translation rules between these information channels. So,
40:07 let's see if we get there. >> Super. Yeah. Thanks very much. That's great. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> what do you think? >> Yeah, I mean, fabulous. I I I love all of it. A bunch of bunch of things. Um, we're we're doing a lot of stuff on this kind of translation idea, not not for photonics, but but for other other modalities and kind of this uh the general [clears throat] idea of talking to things that don't talk yet. So cells, tissues, molecular networks. Um, yeah, we had a we had a an early application where you could talk to a lamp which was not, you know, a scintillating conversationalist, but it was it was but you know, you could say you could talk a little bit about things the lamp cares about. Uh, yeah. Um, what do you think?
40:53 Uh, so so if you're uh if the techn So so let's say the technology was solved in terms of the let's say the biopotons, the technology solved. You've got ways of reading the biophotons. You've got ways of u playing them back if you need to. You've got uh decoding protocols working. What do you think is the endgame in terms of first capabilities, let's say biomedical capabilities, and second, what do you think it means, you know, be beyond like like right now there's sort of these questions. What does it do? Can we prove that it does? Let's go like like fast forward, you know, 10 years after that. Like that's all settled. What's the >> 10 years? >> Yeah. Yeah. You know, hurry up. Like I
41:39 don't know. That's what that's what [laughter] everybody emails me and says hurry up. Um uh so whatever however many years uh all the all the technological stuff is settled, everything works. What do you think is then within reach? What are you going to be able to do? Mhm. >> I think what we I' I'd like to see happen is that we create a sort of like closed loot feedback system where there's perturbations, there's a local injury for whatever dam genetic mutations accumulate because you're sitting under the sun or whatever. Some damage or some state change occurs and there's sensors, wearables, devices that detect these ultra ultra early changes in state change and creates a feedback system where you can modulate it. And so you're trying to prevent these changes
42:25 occurring or maybe not prevent them but move them in a way that the system is able to heal itself. >> Yeah. >> And so you know what that allows us to live longer or healthier that's like a consequence of it. But I think we're trying to get the innate intelligence of our body giving it the equipment to detect and reprogram itself >> would be super cool. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um got it. Do you think that you would have to have direct read and write access to the cells involved or could you do you think with this modality you would be able to do it at a surrogate site that would let you re like because I mean there's going to be all kinds of stuff happening in the body that isn't really accessible directly to sensors right that presumably you know on the surface or something like that. Do you think that this would do you
43:11 think that this modality would let let you reach deep sites in the body that of for the for all the stuff you just mentioned that aren't actually directly accessible to photon-based readings? >> Yeah, I think the magnetic signals is more likely than the photonic. there's going to be scattering and you know all of that physics to to get around but I I think that might be uh I think there's the patterns of these signals like the LTP for example long-term potentiation people have studied for quite a long time and those are established signals and rules that has existed for how memory is encoded and so if we can look at some of these rules that don't change then maybe non-invasively non-locally you can interact with them if you understand the ground truth rules for
43:57 how the let's say electromagnetic signaling occurs within the brain then yeah they can be non-local. >> Yeah. Okay. And I guess one one one last thing before I we got a a break is um the the EMF the cancer EMF data that you that you talked about. What what is the barrier to like how far did you get in terms of what would be needed to you know make a make a useful application for patients out of like like if you look at the whole like what what how do you see that whole field you know if you if you look forward at the road map towards towards patients what what would have been next and you know what's what what stands in our way here >> awesome question there are scientific barriers and then there's societal barriers feels like scientific is easier
44:45 to deal with um the scientific barrier is the heterogeneity in people. And so we're not, let me be, we're not the only ones who've shown magnetic field, brain cancer reduction. There's other companies out there that are doing it. And the reason why this isn't a a gold standard tool is because of the heterogeneity and the lack of um the strength of effects, right? Not completely getting rid of cancer. Um the heterogeneity is a problem because people don't understand electromagnetic matter interactions. we don't know how and why that information is being transduced in a meaningful way. Um so that is I feel like a big barrier and scientifically is that transduction of signal to the biology that is homogeneous every single time that you're getting the effect when you scale from a a dish to humans. Um the other is
45:33 that specificity is a problem because healthy tissue end up also being affected. So if we understand what is electromagnetically or biohysically wrong or energetically uh dysfunctional in a cancer cell versus a healthy cell then you can pattern these weak fields or fields in general that will target those those cancer states. And that's kind of where I was really passionate about your work is that okay there's a there's a state difference there's a clear state difference deolarized versus hyperpolarized >> what is now that dynamic pattern that changes during the development or malignancy and if we modeled that can you then specifically target it uh into the into the brain we're working with glyobblastoma so that's where the the brain analogy comes in. So that's a that's a big barrier is the the
46:20 transduction rules are not well established. Um and then also getting enough energy into the brain into the tissue to cause that change is also not well established. Um so I think if we get those around those two then the technology to build it will be quite simple.
