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Podcast: Big Brains
Episode: Could Plants Unlock Quantum Medicine’s Potential? with Greg Engel
Description: We’ve long marveled at how efficiently plants convert sunlight into energy—but no one guessed they were using quantum mechanics to do it.In this episode, we speak with Greg Engel, a pioneering biophysicist at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry who helped launch the field of quantum biology. Engel explains how plants and bacteria evolved to exploit quantum effects for photosynthesis—and how understanding these systems could spark a revolution in quantum sensing, medicine, and neuroscience.Engel’s team has already built quantum sensors inspired by nature’s designs...