Calgary researchers discover that life has a literal glow

If you’ve ever referred to someone as having a “healthy glow,” know that science backs you up on that observation. It turns out that plants, mice and (presumably) all living creatures emit tiny amounts of light as part of their metabolism. The research comes from the University of Calgary in the form of a paper titled “Imaging Ultraweak Photon Emission From Living and Dead Mice and From Plants Under Stress,” published in the May issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters . Dr. Daniel Oblak , an associate professor at the University of Calgary with a PhD in q uantum optics, told National Post that the experiments emerged from a cross-disciplinary collaboration. “My colleague Christoph Simon has a long-standing interest in quantum effects in biology,” he said. “My background is in quantum information and quantum communication, where we regularly detect very very weak signals of light. So we had the technical expertise in the field and thought it was a nice way to combine quantum technologies with applications that are in other fields.” What they found is that the bodies of mice emit photons of light — far too weak to be seen by the human eye, but special cameras could pick it up. What’s more, dead mice emit far fewer photons. Clearly it’s something about being alive, rather than just being a mouse, that is at play. Oblak didn’t have direct proof that the effect would be seen in humans — dead humans are a lot trickier to work with in a laboratory setting — but said there was no reason to think our bodies would be any different from rodents in that respect. The team also studied the light emitted from the leaves of thale cress and dwarf umbrella trees, and found that when these plants were under stress from chemicals or heat, they produced even more glow than at other times. “When you look at the underlying mechanisms then you would think that there should be the same sort of effect on animals,” Oblak said. “It shouldn’t just be leaves, but we’ve yet to verify that that’s actually the case.” Much work remains to be done, but he suggested that this type of light could be used as a non-invasive way to measure the healthiness of individual plants, whole crops, or even human tissues and organs. “We’re at the stage where we see the principles and we’ve looked at the effects in a lab environment but there’s several move steps to see if the technology delivers what it’s supposed to in a real-world setting,” he said. Oblak is well aware that the notion of life giving off its own glow could strike some people as an almost mystical effect, and he cautions against reading into the research that way. “It’s not an energy field that surrounds a person,” he said. “We try to be very meticulous and scientific around it, but as soon as you talk about this there’s a lot of associations that people make,” he said. “It’s interesting, but it’s not a whole bunch of metaphysical things. It is really a biochemical process that is related to the fact that we’re living. We’re metabolizing, we’re radiating energy to move and to think — it just so happens that a little bit of that energy also comes from us as a little glow.” He gave the example of a glow stick. “You break the glow stick and two chemicals mix and they make light,” he said. “That no more proves that a glow stick has a soul than does this light emission.” That said, the process is still not well understood. “It’s hard to say exactly what chemical process is going on there,” he said. “What is it that decays, which molecule is causing this, does it have an actual role to play? This is part of what we’re looking into.”

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