Biological molecules select their spin
Thursday, March 31, 2011 - 13:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute's Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, definitively shows that a biological molecule DNA can discern between quantum states known as spin.