Towards A New Physics Of Living Systems and Consciousness

Video Description

​​Physicist and physician Dr. Anita Goel has designed the equivalent of the double slit experiment in a living system, to test if the nanomachines that read and write DNA could operate quantum mechanically. In this interview with Hans Busstra, Goel talks about her experiment and explores the new theoretical framework it could lead to: a new physics to understand life, living systems and consciousness. Hans Busstra interviewed Dr. Goel after her presentation at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Barcelona (7 October 2025), this full presentation in which she describes her experiment in detail can we watched here: https://youtu.be/wJDNmhBjtzQ?t=2789 Dr. Anita Goel is a physicist, physician, and pioneering nanotechnology entrepreneur whose work bridges quantum physics, biomedicine, nanotech, and AI. She is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Nanobiosym Research Institute and Nanobiosym Diagnostics (https://www.nanobiosym.com), where she developed the Gene-RADAR, winner of the first XPRIZE in healthcare. Recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s top science and tech innovators and by Scientific American as a leading biotech visionary, she has also earned three DARPA Breakthrough Awards and consistently appears on global top-35 and top-100 lists in nanotech and engineering. On the 11th and the 12th of October Dr. Goel is hosting a global summit at MIT on how a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics, AI and consciousness would influence multiple fields, leading to 'the 5th industrial revolution': https://nanobiosym-summit.webflow.io/ Topics discussed in this video: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:34 A new physics for living systems 00:10:17 How to test quantum effects in biology 00:13:32 The music of organisms: matter and information 00:14:40 On Lamarckian evolution 00:18:17 Could nanomachines process information quantum mechanically? 00:24:19 Do nanomachines reveal the environment 'talking' to them? 00:25:14 How plausible are non-trivial quantum effects at this scale? 00:28:27 Designing the double-slit experiment in living systems 00:32:12 How far are we from the actual experiment? 00:34:25 On consciousness in relationship to quantum mechanics 00:38:01 On the hard problem of consciousness 00:41:28 What if consciousness is fundamental? 00:44:51 Meeting John Wheeler 00:49:08 On the measurement problem 00:54:07 Living systems as a 'high-resolution' theory 00:55:57 Information as that which brings form 00:59:00 The classical story vs. hidden intelligence 01:01:29 Ethical and societal impacts of a new worldview 01:07:40 The divorce between science and spirituality 01:09:58 Humans vs. advanced AI The Essentia Foundation wants to thank The Science Of Consciousness Conference and Robert Neville for their great support in producing this interview. Great nanomachine and quantum visualisations used under fair use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB0GZp-m3vQ&t=97s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG7uCskUOrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe-83tBcxhs&t=67s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBikbn5XJhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmG2ah5Df4g&t=175s Copyright © 2025 Essentia Foundation. All rights on interview content reserved.