The Quantum Light Switch Hidden Inside Every Protein
Proteins are often described as the body’s molecular machines, but the metaphor has always been missing something: an off switch. When a protein misfires, there is no handy dial you can turn to dial its activity back down. For decades, the dream of controlling individual proteins with the precision of a light switch — quite literally, using light — has been one of the holy grails of biochemistry. Now, a team of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Caltech has achieved exactly that. And the mechanism they uncovered is so strange that it belongs as much to quantum physics as it does to biology.