Biophotons and Cellular Communication: How Living Cells Use Light to Speak to Each Other
Introduction
For centuries, biology described the cell as a chemical machine — a system of molecules reacting, dividing, and signaling through purely biochemical pathways. But over the past hundred years, a fundamentally different picture has been emerging. Living cells do not communicate only through hormones, electrical impulses, and molecular signals. They also communicate through light.
This light — called biophotons — is extraordinarily weak, invisible to the naked eye, and yet increasingly recognized as one of the most sophisticated information channels in living systems. Understanding it may require us to rethink some of the most basic assumptions of biology.
1. The Discovery: Gurwitsch and the First Glimpse of Cellular Light
The story begins in 1926, when Russian embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch made a curious observation while studying dividing onion root cells under a microscope. He noticed that when two onion roots were separated by glass, the number of dividing cells differed from those separated by quartz. Glass absorbs ultraviolet light; quartz does not.
From this simple observation, Gurwitsch drew a remarkable conclusion: living organisms communicate with each other via ultraviolet light exchange. He called this radiation mitogenetic radiation — light emitted by dividing cells that could stimulate division in neighboring cells.
This idea was ahead of its time, and largely ignored for decades.
2. Scientific Foundations: From Schrödinger to Popp
Gurwitsch’s insight found theoretical support from an unexpected source. In 1933, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger — one of the founders of quantum theory and Nobel Prize laureate — proposed that living cells maintain their extraordinary level of organization by continually drawing order from their environment. He identified sunlight as the primary source of this organizing input.
In 1936, Professor Burr and Dr. Meader at Yale University stated a principle that has since been confirmed across biology: wherever there is life, electrical and electromagnetic phenomena will also be found.
The modern scientific framework for understanding cellular light was established in the 1970s by German biophysicist Fritz Albert Popp, a Nobel Prize nominee in Physics. Popp coined the term biophoton — defining it as the coherent, ultra-weak light emission spontaneously produced by all living cells. Unlike the chaotic light of a burning candle, biophotons exhibit a degree of quantum coherence that suggests they serve a functional informational role rather than being mere metabolic noise.
The existence of biophotons is now broadly accepted by the scientific community.
3. What Are Biophotons?
Biophotons are ultra-weak photon emissions (UPE) produced by living systems, primarily attributed to oxidation reactions in which reactive oxygen species (ROS) play a major role. Their intensity is generally 3 to 6 orders of magnitude lower than light visible to the naked eye — yet their wavelengths extend across the entire visible spectrum.
Detection of biophotons requires highly sensitive single-photon counters. What makes biophotons scientifically remarkable is not their intensity, but their coherence — the statistical ordering of their emissions. Experimental studies have shown that this coherence plays an important role in communication between biological systems.
Biophotons have been detected in bacteria, plants, animal cells, and even in the human nervous system.
4. How Cells Generate Electromagnetic Fields
A central question is: how exactly do cells generate the electromagnetic fields that carry biophotonic information?
The answer lies in ion channels — protein structures embedded in the cell membrane that regulate the flow of charged ions (sodium, potassium, chlorine) between the inside and outside of the cell.
When ion channels open and close, they create transient transmembrane ion currents. The spatial and temporal coherent action of hundreds of adjacent ion channels — all conducting ions simultaneously — produces electric and magnetic fields that dominate all other field sources in the cellular environment. These fields propagate outward from the membrane like the fields of a miniature antenna.
The key principle is spatiotemporal coherence: ion motion synchronized in position, direction, and time produces coherent currents whose resulting electromagnetic field is far more powerful and organized than the sum of its parts. This is the fundamental mechanism of wireless communication in biological systems.
5. Biophotons as Information Carriers
The evidence that cells use biophotons specifically as information carriers — not merely as metabolic byproducts — has accumulated substantially over recent decades.
More than 400 published papers spanning from the 1920s onward describe signaling between chemically separated cell cultures proposed to be mediated by light or other electromagnetic radiation. The following findings are particularly significant:
Non-chemical, non-electrical cell communication. Studies have demonstrated communication between neuroblastoma cells physically separated in a manner that prevents any exchange of chemical or electrical signals. The observed communication was attributed to electromagnetic fields — most likely biophotons.
Molecular recognition by resonance. Living cells face a staggering organizational challenge: tens of thousands of different types of molecules must find and bind their specific targets among millions of other molecules — performing this feat thousands of times per second in a single cell. The proposed mechanism is electromagnetic molecular resonance: each molecule emits a unique electromagnetic frequency, allowing it to recognize and be drawn to complementary molecules that vibrate at matching frequencies. Analysis of more than 1,000 proteins from over 30 functional groups confirmed that proteins sharing the same biological function share a single characteristic frequency peak — while proteins with different functions share no common peak.
The speed advantage. Chemical signaling takes milliseconds to seconds. Biophotons travel at the speed of light, and quantum transfer may be even faster — potentially instantaneous. Some intracellular and intercellular communication must occur at the speed of light in order to make the coordination of living processes physically possible. Biophotons offer exactly this supplementary high-speed signaling pathway.
6. Biophotons in the Brain: Quantum Entanglement Through Neural Tissue
Perhaps the most remarkable frontier of biophoton research concerns the brain. Several researchers have proposed that the brain is the ideal environment for photonic communication — and the evidence is beginning to support this.
Hollow microtubules — cylindrical protein structures present in all cells, but especially abundant in neurons — have an inner diameter that is constant and sized precisely to act as optical fibers for biophoton transmission. Biophotons generated within nerve cells can travel through these microtubular waveguides, through the myelin sheaths of axons, and through protein-to-protein contacts — enabling a light-based signaling network running through the nervous system.
In 2016, a scientific paper titled Photon Entanglement Through Brain Tissue reported a striking experimental result: a pair of entangled photons was generated, and one photon of each pair was passed through tissue slices from rat brain cortex, brain stem, and kidney. The results showed that quantum entanglement in polarization was preserved after transmission through brain tissue — and that brain tissue showed significantly stronger entanglement preservation than kidney tissue. The unique network structure of neurons and axons appears to provide organized quantum pathways for photon transmission.
A subsequent study confirmed these results, demonstrating enhanced transmission and entanglement properties of light beams with orbital angular momentum traveling through mouse brain tissue.
The implication is profound: information in the brain may be transmittable instantaneously, without any time delay, through quantum entanglement mediated by biophotons.
7. Solitons: The Self-Reinforcing Wave Messengers of Life
Alongside biophotons, living systems employ another category of electromagnetic signal: solitons — self-reinforcing solitary waves that maintain their shape and velocity as they propagate through biological structures.
Solitons travel along proteins, microtubules, and DNA. Unlike ordinary waves, they do not disperse or lose their shape over distance. During transmission, solitons do not carry elementary particles — they carry information itself, encoded in conformational changes of the molecules through which they travel.
Solitons have been proposed to play a role in protein folding — one of the deepest unsolved problems in biology. A newly synthesized protein must fold from a linear chain of amino acids into its precise three-dimensional functional configuration in seconds or less, despite the astronomically large number of possible conformational states. A random search through all possible configurations would take billions of years. Soliton excitations propagating along the protein chain may guide the folding process by creating coherent vibrational domains that direct the molecule toward its functional configuration.
Research has also identified Junk DNA — the non-coding regions of the genome long dismissed as functionless — as a major source of biophoton ultra-weak light emissions. The degree of DNA coiling is proportional to biophotonic activity: the more unfolded the DNA strands, the greater the photon emission, indicating that DNA functions as both a storage site and an emitter of biophotons.
8. The Holographic Genome: Non-Local Biological Memory
The most far-reaching implication of biophoton research concerns the nature of biological information itself.
Several scientists have introduced the concept of a quantum biohologram — the idea that DNA nucleotide sequences are capable of projecting holographic images of biostructures. In this model, the intrinsic information that defines the living state of an organism is stored holographically — distributed throughout the organism in a non-local manner, such that every part contains information about the whole.
This holographic organization could operate at multiple levels simultaneously: atoms, molecules, proteins, cellular water, microtubules, and electromagnetic fields. The collective information would be projected holographically into a memory space from which every cell is continuously informed about the integrated state of its tissue type and the whole organism.
This non-locality is directly connected to the quantum phenomenon of entanglement: discrete electromagnetic frequency patterns have been shown to fit precisely with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox experiments in which electromagnetic radiation promotes states of quantum entanglement. A cell-bound holographic memory space could be responsible for long-distance, non-local communication between physically separated cells — without any direct physical connection between them.
As Gariaev and colleagues have formulated: protein biosynthesis is a key, but not the only, basic information function of chromosomes. There are other, no less important, holographic and quantum non-locality functions related to morphogenesis — the development of biological form. At this level, the genome functions as a quantum biocomputer, broadcasting genetic and metabolic information across cells, tissues, and the whole organism via coherent photon radiation and its nonlinear vibrational states. DNA information presents itself in the form of dynamically polarized holograms and phantom DNA structures.
9. Conclusions
The picture that emerges from a century of biophoton research is one of extraordinary sophistication. Living cells are not merely chemical factories — they are quantum electromagnetic communication systems of a complexity that current technology is only beginning to measure.
Key established findings include:
- All living cells emit biophotons — coherent ultra-weak light with properties distinct from thermal radiation
- Cells communicate with each other via biophotons across distances, without any chemical or electrical connection
- Biophotons travel through neural microtubules as optical fibers, enabling light-speed signaling in the nervous system
- Quantum entanglement of photons is preserved through brain tissue, suggesting instantaneous non-local information transfer
- Molecular recognition — the basis of all biochemistry — may be mediated by electromagnetic resonance between molecules
- DNA functions as both a storage medium and an emitter of biophotons, with the genome operating as a holographic quantum information system
- Solitons carry biological information along proteins, microtubules, and DNA without dispersion or energy loss
Science is still at the very beginning of exploring the full role of biophotons in the organization of life. Many questions remain open. But one conclusion is already clear: light is not incidental to biology. It is woven into the fabric of life itself — as a messenger, an organizer, a memory, and perhaps as the deepest language that living matter uses to know itself.
Key References
- Gurwitsch A.G. Mitogenic radiation. 1926.
- Schrödinger E. What is Life? Cambridge University Press, 1944.
- Popp F.A. Biophotons. 1998.
- Shi R. et al. Photon Entanglement Through Brain Tissue. Scientific Reports. 2016.
- Gariaev P.P. et al. Spectroscopy of Radio-Wave Radiations of Localized Photons. Sensors and Systems. 2000, No. 9, pp. 2–13.
- Gariaev P.P. Another Understanding of the Model of Genetic Code. Open Journal of Genetics. 2015, v.5, pp. 92–109.
- Wireless Communication in Biosystems. Journal of Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. 2017.