We're digging into how living creatures – including us – sense and respond to magnetic fields with quantum biologist Margaret Ahmad of the University of Sorbonne in Paris.
For decades, biologists knew about striking examples of species apparently navigating by Earth’s magnetic field, from monarch butterflies to loggerhead turtles to racing pigeons. Yet for years, many physicists said any ‘magnetosense’ was impossible, insisting the Earth’s field is far too weak to affect any biological processes within living cells. And yet, life really had found a way, and Margaret was one of the key researchers who showed how.
Back in the 1990s, she discovered a blue light receptor in plants, part of a mysterious family of proteins called cryptochromes, and she has since has pioneered research showing how these receptors don’t just sense light but magnetic fields, too. Through quantum physical effects, these proteins magnify impossibly weak magnetic signals into measurable biological responses in a cell.
For Margaret, this connection with the magnetic fields around us is a fundamental characteristic of all life, that should transform our thinking about everything from bird migration, to plant growth, to health effects in humans – and might even lead to revolutionary medical treatments. I spoke to her about her research, what it’s like doing science ‘out on a limb’, as she puts it, and what to do when the evidence leads you off the beaten track…
Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University
https://www.ibps.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/ibps/directory/17216-Margaret-Ahmad
Hypersensitivity to man-made electromagnetic fields: 2024 case report
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39108419/
2024 review on cryptochromes
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38495372/
New Scientist story I wrote about Ahmad’s work in 2020 (£)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251835
2021 review on the bird magnetic compass
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.667000/full
Roswitha Wiltschko’s lab
https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/47093824/Physiology_and_Ecology_of_Behaviour
Some bacteria sense magnetic fields via magnetite crystals. It's possible these play a role in other species too, maybe even humans
https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019.abstract
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