Biophoton

[forests]

I have been researching Biophoton and Bio-communication recently. But I noticed this topic is kind of shunned by "mainstream" science, and that it has ended up as a fringe view? But biophotons do exist.

 

It seems to be associated with the work of Fritz-Albert Popp.

 

Here is an interesting paper on the topic:

 

http://zeniclinic.com/zen/articles/BiophotonsAndBiocommunication.pdf

 

The topic of bio-informational aspects of photon emission has a

history of more than eighty years. It is an example of a research topic that is

inadequately studied within mainstream biology. This article reviews the research

activities during the three main phases of this line of this research. The

first period is characterized by Gurwitsch-type experimentation on mitogenetic

radiation. Radiation was detected by changes in biological organisms

that function as radiation detectors.

 

From another website:

 

Biophotons were first discovered in 1922 by a Russian embryologist named Alexander Gurwitsch and are classified as ultra-weak photon emissions from living systems (1). Further research done since the 1960′s has conclusively demonstrated that these biophotons do indeed exist and play an important role in the functioning of living organisms (2).

 

This low-intensity glow that is emitted by living organisms cannot be seen by the naked eye, however, equipment such as biophoton analyzers and photomultipliers can pick up these weak signals and present researchers with data and diagrams.

 

One of the main researchers on this topic is Dr. Fritz Albert Popp. For over 30 years Dr. Popp and his team have done extensive research and experimentation on biophotons, and have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that biophotons do exist, have specific properties, and can fluctuate at different levels. These levels have been measured through a device created by Dr. Popp and others called a biophoton meter.

 

http://www.integral-health-guide.com/biophotons-the-light-in-our-cells/

 

 

As you can see the journal who have published the paper will probably be called "fringe science" and the other website link. The question is whay is mainstream biology not willing to study biophotons, when it clear they do exist?

Edited November 16, 2012 by forests

[Rade]

The topic is recognized within mainstream biology, but it does appear that most of the research is outside USA...take a look at the large number of reference papers at the end of this link. Very interesting topic that would be of interest to research biochemists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophoton

[FrankM]

I have been researching Biophoton and Bio-communication recently. But I noticed this topic is kind of shunned by "mainstream" science, and that it has ended up as a fringe view? But biophotons do exist. ....

 

I am not surprised by the lack of responses to your topic, even though it has over 200 views. Mainstream science, a term that was used in a reply to the topic Ionizing Radiation Energy Coupling, has a tendency of ignoring the details of a process, preferring to use terms such as, spontaneous absorption and spontaneous emission as the explanation for a process. Those terms are not an explanation of the process, and seem to be used when they do not understand precisely what is happening.

 

When researching material for a paper I am preparing for a particular IEEE publication, I did see a reference to precisely what your post is referring to, biological material emitting electromagnetic radiation in what is termed the spectral range of light. I did not save the reference because it wasn't specific to what I am researching.

 

It is patently obvious our bodies constantly emit electromagnetic (EM) radiation, as that is what we call heat, infrared EM emissions. If a body does not emit energy in the infrared spectral range, it is commonly referred to as dead.

 

The term biophoton is unnecessary as it implies it is different from the mainstream term photon, which could be the reason why the study of EM emissions from biological material is referred to as a fringe science. For over a century the medical community has been using a primitive EM energy detection device to determine if a body is emitting infrared energy within a specific range, something they call a thermometer.

 

The medical community is very attached to the thermometer, using that as one of the primary indicator of a bodies health. I am not surprised the medical community would call photomultiplier detectors that can detect low-level light emissions from the body as a fringe science, because they really don't understand the EM energy transfer processes within the body in the first place.

 

You used the term bio-communications. I had saved a reference that uses the concept of bio-communications. The reference doesn't specifically use the term bio-communications, but that is exactly what they are describing.

 

http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/101/structural_view_of_biology.do?c=Infrastructure_and_Communication

[CraigD]

I am not surprised by the lack of responses to your topic, even though it has over 200 views. Mainstream science, a term that was used in a reply to the topic Ionizing Radiation Energy Coupling, has a tendency of ignoring the details of a process, preferring to use terms such as, spontaneous absorption and spontaneous emission as the explanation for a process. Those terms are not an explanation of the process, and seem to be used when they do not understand precisely what is happening.

I think we’d best have that discussion in its thread, Ionizing Radiation Energy Coupling.

 

Other than as regards the philosophy and sociology of science, which pervade all of science and human culture, the subject of biophotons and ionizing radiation are little related, because biophotons are understood to be much too low energy (wavelength 200 to 800 nm) to be ionizing radiation (wavelength 124 nm, the ionization line of hydrogen, and shorter). It’s good to understand that the minimum energy (and corresponding maximum wavelength) of ionizing radiation is defined fuzzily (see the wikipedia section “ionization and the definition problem”) – after all, the photomultipliers used to detect very low-intensity light like biophotons operate due to the ionization of atoms is photoelectric materials, which have ionizing energies (usually called, rather confusingly, “work functions”) in the range of the energies of biophotons. However, none of the more credible students of the possible biology of biophotons (as a “fringe science”, there are many less credible ones, which, though an interesting bunch, if you’re going to make sense of the subject, must be mostly ignored) propose that biophotons function by causing damage to cells in the manner associated with the terms “ionizing radiation” and radiobiology.

 

In short, the mainstream field of radiobiology and the fringe one biophotonology (a term I just invented, to keep it distinct from biophotonics, a mainstream technological field concerned with studying biological materials with photons, typically laser beams) are little related.

 

Readers might detect some affection in my description of folk around the fringe of biophotonology. My introduction to the field at the tender age of 19 or 20 was via a philosophy grad student and the marvelous, though regrettably pseudoscientific to outright fraudulent book The Secret Life of Plants, which proceeds from the more mainstream biophotonological hypothesis that cells within an individual organism communicate using biophotons, to the idea that individual organisms, especially plants, communicate with each other using them. After months of being credulous of this book’s ideas, the realization that well written, popular books purporting to be science popularizations can be instead fairly unbridled fantasy was an epiphany for me, one that has served me well.

 

I think it’s helpful to distinguish credible from speculative from incredible ideas in biophotonology

• That biological processes that are not visibly bioluminescent emit very low intensity (that is, numbers of photons much less than those of visibly bioluminescent phenomena) ultraviolet through visible light is undisputed fact, discovered nearly 100 years ago by Alexander Gurwitsch. Explaining the metabolic processes that cause this is a credible, though obscure, biological subfield.
  
• Using these biophotons to detect or cause biological processes, such as cell division, while reasonable, and claimed to have been done by folk such as Gurwitsch, haven’t been replicated by others, so came to be branded “pathological science”
  
• That biophotons play a pervasive “bi-communication” role, as or more important than nerves and hormones, is pseudoscience.
  

The difference between pathological science and pseudoscience, though their meaning overlap much, is that the former is something to which some otherwise credible scientists fall victim when their enthusiasm and hope for a tentative theory overwhelms their scientific objectivity and caution, while the latter is when someone who either doesn’t know science, or who does, but is seeking to deceive others, attempts to present a scientifically unsupported idea as scientifically supported by describing it in a way that sounds, to a scientifically inexperienced audience, like credible science.

 

The term biophoton is unnecessary as it implies it is different from the mainstream term photon, which could be the reason why the study of EM emissions from biological material is referred to as a fringe science.

The term biophoton describes an ordinary photon emitted by a biological process other than one of the well known and higher output ones termed bioluminescent.

 

It’s sometimes convenient to describe particles not only by what it is, but by its source: for example, cathode ray rather than the source-neutral electron beam. I think I see you point about the term biophoton, Frank. Perhaps combining such terms into a single word suggest they are not just the same particle from a specified source, but a different kind of particle, and should be avoided.

 

For over a century the medical community has been using a primitive EM energy detection device to determine if a body is emitting infrared energy within a specific range, something they call a thermometer.

A typical thermometer isn’t an electromagnetic radiation detector in the same way that photoelectric cells and photomultiplier tubes are. It’s doesn’t detect infrared (740 to 300000 nm wavelength) photons, which may not be present in significant fluxes in the measured materials. Most thermometers measure their own temperature, which, in the case of the “primitive” for we stick into various dark, wet animal orifices, becomes the same as that of the surrounding material to be measured mostly due to heat conduction. Heat conducted is carried by virtual, not actual photons, so isn’t considered EM radiation.

 

The medical community is very attached to the thermometer, using that as one of the primary indicator of a bodies health. I am not surprised the medical community would call photomultiplier detectors that can detect low-level light emissions from the body as a fringe science, because they really don't understand the EM energy transfer processes within the body in the first place.

Some nurses, MD, and other medical clinicians have studied physics, so understand how electromagnetic radiation transfers energy to all atomic matter, not just biological matter. However, this education isn’t necessary for clinicians, any more than it’s necessary for a computer programmer like me to understand the physics of the electronic components in a computer.

 

I work in medical computer systems, so talk to a lot of clinicians – over the years, several hundred, at least. Though I’ve discussed biophotons with only a few of them – perhaps 10 or 20 – my experience is that the only ones who know anything about them at all, let alone consider them fringe science are those who were exposed to the ideas outside of their academic and professional careers, in ways similar to my own. Had I spent my time at school studying only class materials, and my subsequent professional career only designing and coding software, I wouldn’t have read The Secret Life of Plants or other classics and throwaways of fringe science. Had I, or you, or nearly anyone reading this, stayed within strict academic and professional boundaries, I doubt we'd be spending time reading and writing at hypography.

 

The medical profession is in the business of comforting and curing sick people, and preventing well people from becoming sick. Like computer users and auto mechanics, it’s rare that they care much about the underlying physics of the objects of their attention or the tools of their trade, even though many of them, such as MRI scanners, are much newer and more complicated than the photomultipliers Gurwitsch used in the 1920s through ‘40s to observe biophotons for the first time.

[FrankM]

CraigD, Thanks for pointing what I have highlighted in bold:

The medical profession is in the business of comforting and curing sick people, and preventing well people from becoming sick. Like computer users and auto mechanics, it’s rare that they care much about the underlying physics of the objects of their attention or the tools of their trade even though many of them, such as MRI scanners, are much newer and more complicated than the photomultipliers Gurwitsch used in the 1920s through ‘40s to observe biophotons for the first time.

 

For several decades, I was directly involved with the failure diagnosis, identifying the specific mechanism(s) that caused a failure or unexplained anomalies, of complex systems. Many of the failures and anomalies were precisely because the users of the systems did not know the basic principles by which the system functioned.

 

I really don't like to use speculative terms such as virtual photons to explain the operation of a thermometer that is stuck under ones tongue. Technically, a mercury type thermometer is a biophotonic detector that uses a different physics principle than an infrared thermometer.

 

Attaching a prefix to the term photon is implying it has some field characteristic that is different from all the other photons from multiple sources in the universe.

 

Infrared scanning devices are commonly used in the medical profession.

http://www.thermaview.com.au/Infrared-Body-Scans.php

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20100819/Emunamedica-licenses-technology-for-near-infrared-wound-monitor-from-Drexel-University.aspx

 

It is not a mystery that our bodies emit EM energy in other than the infrared spectrum. Regardless of how the EM energy is created, it is detectable by devices that transfer the electromagnetic eneregy of the emitted wave to some type of detector that can indicate magnitude. The term biophoton does not define the spectral range of the emission, nor does the term bioluminescence. Electromagnetic biology is here to stay for awhile; try those two words in your favorite search engine.