Rethinking Biology: Energy and Information | Dr Nirosha Murugan

**Benjamin Hopkins** (0:04)
Everyone, welcome back to the show. I did just start the show without hitting record, so off to a rocketing start as always. We have the pleasure of having Dr. Nirosha Murugan on today. Nirosha, thanks so much for the time in advance.

**Nirosha Murugan** (0:16)
Thank you for having me.

**Benjamin Hopkins** (0:17)
We're really excited to have you on. As an opening frame to start our conversation, I think it's good to have an appreciation that a lot of scientific theories are sort of rough approximations of reality, right? Some may explain reality better than others. Einstein's Relativity explains reality better than Newton's Laws, Complexity Economics better than neoclassical economics, Metabolic Theory of Cancer better than Somatic Theory. My first question for you is, what do you think is a better approximation of reality when it comes to biology than we traditionally have had in the past?

**Nirosha Murugan** (0:46)
Wonderful. I think this really leads into one of the most fundamental aspects that I am passionate about and what I lean into in science is we have built our understanding of life and biology through this molecular lens, through the idea that information is held and transferred through genes, proteins in the typical central dogma mindset. The new, new, if we want to call it that way, another way of looking at how life and information propagates is through energy dynamics. So what kinds of information is held in different types of energy? So I think this could be this alternative view of looking at how life emerges and how life propagates and how biology actually also propagates.

**Benjamin Hopkins** (1:29)
Wonderful. I guess to tie into that then, it would be wrong to assume that everyone's version of energy is the same. Some people it's calories, some people it's spiritual, some people it's what they put in their car, whether it be electric or diesel. So how do you interpret energy?

**Nirosha Murugan** (1:45)
Fundamentally, energy, if you think about it, fundamental physics, or if you take all the different definitions, it boils down to the capability or capacity to be able to do work. That is what energy is. So if we think about it in the energy that you put into your car, the energy is going to make your car move. Think about it in the spiritual dimension, there's some sort of larger consciousness that needs to be able to move and do work and maybe manifest through ourselves. Biologically, energy is stored potential for systems to move and do work. So I think there's obviously many different types of energy, but there's a really interesting duality, especially in this world of AI and information, this two-sided coin idea of energy and information. I think if we start to look at life and biology through that lens, so much starts to make more sense.

**Benjamin Hopkins** (2:36)
Okay. That's fascinating. I mean, you often hear quoted, I always forget which law of thermodynamics it is, but energy can't be destroyed. It can only be created nor destroyed. Created or destroyed. Thank you. And I think people take that and intuitively get that. But when you look at life through that understanding, as you said, things start to make more sense. So when it comes to human health, what does looking at human health through the lens of energy clear up for us?

**Nirosha Murugan** (2:59)
Well, it tells us that just taking that law of thermodynamics, that energy can't be created nor destroyed, then it must be then transformed. So when we think about it fundamentally, and what we have been looking at it so far is that that energy has been constrained and transformed through the lens of chemical bonds, right? We break ATP, that's what we classically think of our energy token, but now we're starting to see that there's other carriers of energy and information in terms of light, in terms of magnetic fields, in terms of bioelectricity. Those are all different modalities of carrying and transforming that energy potential that exists within biology. So if we think about this in terms of our human health, where when we eat food or when we exercise or when we sleep, we can kind of reframe how we think about those different modalities and those different energy transformations being changed. So think of them as individual signals. How do those signals change in response to these behaviors that we do on a daily basis?

**Benjamin Hopkins** (3:51)
Okay, that clears a lot up. And actually it seems to be quite far from the traditional consensus in biology, right? And it seems to have a more appreciation of the human body as a complex adaptive system, as opposed to it's this sort of reductionist...