Summary
A review is given of Fröhlich's approach to biology from the side of theoretical physics, and illustrated in the context of his prediction of three types of coherent excitations in living systems based on their dielectric and elastic properties and far-from-equilibrium (non-linear) character. Supporting experimental evidence is presented, and the difficulty in achieving reproducibility addressed. His envisaged role of coherent excitations in cell division and its control is outlined, together with the implications for cancer - as understood at the time of his work.
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Extract
Fröhlich's Physical Theory of Cancer - Fröhlich's Path From Theoretical Physics to Biology, and the Cancer Problem
Around 1965, Fröhlich and his wife were in Alpbach (Austrian Tyrol), where she was attending a conference on science and life, while he indulged his love of mountain-climbing. Quite by chance, she there met Maurice Marois, a professor of Medicine at the Sorbonne and founder in 1960 of l'Institut de la Vie in Paris. They casually embarked on a discussion of the relation of physics to life, in the course of which he told Marois that her husband was a famous theoretical physicist to whom she later introduced him. Keen to pursue the contact, Marois suggested that they should meet in Paris, where, during a lunch, Fröhlich's wife happened to mention that, according to Wigner, 'life' was impossible from the point of view of quantum mechanics. At this, Marois became excited, and asked Fröhlich what could be done to bridge the gap between physics and biology. At the time, he was rather reluctant to get involved, since not only had he never really been interested in this question but also, because he was then immersed in pure theoretical physics from which he did not wish to be deflected. Marois had persisted, however, and eventually Fröhlich agreed to help organise what was to be the first of many successful international conferences on theoretical physics and biology that were held, under the auspices of l'Institut de la Vie, in Versailles. These conferences, which continued, biennially, until 1988, were attended by highly eminent physicists and biologists, including such people as Onsager, Prigogine, Crick, Edelman, Cooper and Wigner himself.
That Fröhlich had agreed to get involved was due to the fact that his discussions with Marois about physics and biology had reminded him of something he had learned about living systems already in the late 1930s when he was at the University of Bristol. There, in the course of a conversation with an endocrinologist friend of his, Max Reiss1 , Reiss had told him that a small potential difference of about 100 mV is maintained across the plasma membrane of a living cell. Upon ascertaining the thickness of the membrane layer (of the order of 10 nm), Fröhlich immediately realised that this implied an enormous electric field of the ...See the full content of this document
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