Quantum mechanics belongs to laboratories, vacuums, and temperatures at which atoms stop trembling — in short, to conditions that simply can’t exist inside a living organism. Right?
Wrong — and the green sulfur bacterium from a hot spring stands ready to demonstrate this neatly.
The green sulfur bacterium — a creature so primitive that it has no brain, no nervous system, and not even a nucleus in its cell. It lives in hot springs, feeds on light and hydrogen sulfide, and its single job is to convert photons into energy. Photosynthesis.
In 2007, Greg Engel and his team at Berkeley (Nature) discovered that this bacterium does its photosynthesis quantum-mechanically.