Cells Emit Light Before They Die

Over 30 years ago, and quite by accident, German scientist FA Popp and his colleagues discovered that cells emit light before they die.

This observation, as enigmatic as it is elegiac, required many more years of study to be confirmed. However, he offered a particular description of the properties of the human cell. The same postulate managed to caress the popular imagination and collide head-on with the scientific skepticism of the time.

The discovery

According to the scientist, such a poetic phenomenon reflects the programmed tendency of human cells to emit ultra-weak light radiation – made up of what he called biophotons – with an intensity exponentially greater than usual during the moments before the cessation of their vital function.

This ability is not observable only in the last moments of the cell’s existence. According to Popp, a faithful follower of the work of the Russian A. Gurwitsch, every multicellular living being emits a light that seems to be decisive in intercellular communication.

This communication is essential for the coordinated work of the various cellular functions. Furthermore, it is articulated by virtue of a language of regularity and irregularity in the aforementioned light emissions.

The first conclusions reached by the German scientist were confirmed in the field of health. He suggested that the quantity and characteristics of these biophotonic irradiations show a statistical correlation with the state of health of the organism in general and of the human body in particular.

This concept structured the narrative, vehemently and controversially defended by the scientist, that the more chaotic the emission of units of light, the more it would reveal the presence of disease. However, this peculiar perspective, which counted on several promoters, has not yet been scientifically validated in a reliable way.

Although such approaches to human health have no official endorsement or accepted clinical application, this cellular bioluminous emission has been shown to intervene in the processes of information transmission between cells.

Scientist S. Mayburov, who published his studies in the technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is responsible for this scientific concordance between light and cell biology.

Cells emit light, how is that possible?

An obvious reality is that living cells receive sunlight and store it by collecting their constituent units: photons. Otherwise the phenomenon of photosynthesis would not exist and the plants would not obtain energy for their subsistence.

On a planet without plants, breathable oxygen would be too scarce and incompatible with animal life; without photons, we simply wouldn’t be here.

According to the Einsteinian principle that matter is not destroyed but only transformed, the appropriation of photons by the cell – for the performance of its functions and the conservation of its constituent parts – leads to the reuse of that light energy and the spontaneous loss , as occurs in any thermodynamic system, of portions of that energy. It does not seem strange, therefore, that a cell emits light.

In line with the above, Nobel Prize winner A. Szent-Györgyi, a renowned 20th-century Hungarian physiologist, theorized that energy, so essential for life on Earth, is not just the bargaining chip in every function and process. cellular but, in an indispensable way, it is necessary for the maintenance of the same cellular structure.

And that energy, in its most primordial and precursor variant, is precisely the energy that arises as luminous radiation from the largest of sources: the Sun.

The poetry of the cell that gives its light away before dying

Popp himself suggested, on the basis of his knowledge of cells in stressful situations, that this cellular action of rapidly and intensely discarding their luminescent content in the moments before death responded to a rebalancing mechanism of the cellular environment.

Thus, in an attempt to enrich its external environment and diffuse energetic components that may still be useful, the cell would lose its photonic charge explosively before ceasing to exist.

Molecular considerations aside, we glimpse here a metaphor that reflects, almost specularly, the same explosion of the old overgrown stars we know as supernovae.

By gravitationally collapsing into the final instances of their existence as stars, supernovae emit an enormous amount of light radiation. From our terrestrial observers, we see this phenomenon as an eternal splendor.

And this explosion also serves to make the galactic environment a richer one; to return the atoms that millions of years ago decided to attract each other to form a rising star. These atoms will become part of new stars, in the same way that the energy of the cell will be the energy of many others.

Perhaps both phenomena are the expression of the same law of the Universe which operates on such disparate scales; perhaps the smallest is a reflection of the largest and vice versa.

Even though we know so little about reality and despite the limitations of our scientific method, we have science to thank for communicating in a poetic way.