X-Message-Number: 15888 From: Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 01:48:09 EST Subject: The Book: "The Touchstone of Life, Molecular Information, Cell Communication..." Cryonet: I just finished this 366-page softcover (been at it off and on since Christmas) by biophysicist Werner R. Loewenstein, 1999, Oxford University Press (+/- $20, CI site link to Amazon.com). A little heavy duty for those not much into Biology I suppose, but several Cryonet participants might appreciate it. Chapter 13, "Neuronal Communication, Neuronal Computation, and Conscious Thought," might be a worthy "summary interface" between Artificial Intelligence and Biological Intelligence for some. The subsection titled "Quantum Coherence" (same chapter) might offer some off-label potential significance to cryopreservation researchers--you never know. From Loewenstein's text: QUOTE "Quantum-coherent oscillations are difficult to demonstrate on living systems--heat effects, due to resonance in thermal frequency modes, all too readily intrude, jumbling the experimental picture. I can speak with feeling here--I tried my hand at this in the 1960s, without success. Meanwhile, however, some positive findings have been reported in probings of various types of cell with low-intensity millimeter waves. Grundler and Keilmann, for example, found a resonance response in cellular growth of yeast--a sharp nonthermal resonance at 5 x 10 [to the 10th power] Hz (1 Hz = 1 oscillation per second). The result is within expectation of the Frohlich hypothesis--the coupled-dipole idea implied that, at a critical threshold of energy input, the system would oscillate coherently in a single vibrational mode in the range of 10 [to the 9th power] to 10 [to the 11th power] Hz (all other modes being in thermal equilibrium)." UNQUOTE From the book cover: QUOTE "Among the tens of thousands of articles that I've read during my career as a research scientist, the one that most astonished me was published over 30 years ago by Werner Loewenstein and his colleagues...In this new book, Loewenstein, the man who thereby opened the field of cell-to-cell communication, now summarizes the whole field and its implications." --Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize winner "Werner R. Loewenstein won world renown for his discoveries in cell communication and biological information transfer. He was Professor of Physiology and Director of the Cell Physics Laboratory at Columbia University and is presently Director of the Laboratory of Cell Communication at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts." UNQUOTE Regards, David C. Johnson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15888