There’s a fine line between being hailed as a visionary and being denounced as a crank, as Iraq-born physicist Jim Al-Khalili is only too aware. Seated in his office at the University of Surrey in the U.K. on a sunny day, he recalls a less tranquil time in his career, almost 15 years ago. Back then, he and his Surrey colleague, biologist Johnjoe McFadden, explored a strange mechanism to explain how DNA — the molecule that carries our genetic code — may mutate.
Their theory caused a stir because it invoked quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the behavior of particles in the subatomic realm. Their idea gave some insight into the origins of genetic mutations, which over the centuries have given rise to the variety of species in the biological kingdom, and in the short term can lead to the development of diseases like cancer. The proposal was scoffed at, however, sparking incredulity from both biologists and physicists because quantum effects supposedly hold sway only on the smallest scales and cannot govern large biological molecules.
“Senior colleagues in physics warned me off this line of research, saying, ‘This isn’t just speculative, it’s wacky,’ ” Al-Khalili says. “I have since realized that some of the best ideas come out of seemingly crazy thoughts, because otherwise they wouldn’t be new.”
