Mae-Wan Ho: The Organism as a Liquid Crystal Rainbow

How a Geneticist Discovered That Living Bodies Are Quantum Coherent Systems

In 1993, Mae-Wan Ho pointed a polarizing microscope at a living fruit fly larva and saw something that should not have been possible according to conventional biology. The entire organism glowed with brilliant, iridescent colors — like a living rainbow. The colors were not pigmentation. They were not bioluminescence. They were the result of an optical property called birefringence — the same property that makes liquid crystals in LCD screens display colors.

The implication was revolutionary: the living organism was behaving as a single, coherent liquid crystal. Not a collection of independent cells, not a bag of chemical reactions, but a unified, ordered system with the optical properties of a crystal — while simultaneously being fluid, flexible, and alive.

This single observation launched a research program that would challenge some of the deepest assumptions of both biology and physics. Mae-Wan Ho, born in Hong Kong in 1941, educated at the University of Hong Kong and later a reader in biology at the Open University in the United Kingdom, would spend the next two decades developing a radical new understanding of the living organism: not as a machine governed by genes, not as a collection of molecular interactions, but as a coherent quantum system operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium, storing and transferring energy with an efficiency that approaches the theoretical maximum.

Her masterwork, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms (first published in 1993, with expanded editions in 1998 and 2008), is one of the most important and least known books in the history of biology. It proposes nothing less than a new physics of the living state.

The Problem with Molecular Biology

Mae-Wan Ho came to her revolutionary work through a growing dissatisfaction with the dominant framework of molecular biology — the Central Dogma of DNA to RNA to protein, the gene-centric view of evolution, and the mechanistic model of the organism as a collection of molecular machines.

Her critique was not philosophical but physical. The mechanistic model of biology, she argued, violates fundamental principles of physics. Specifically:

The energy problem. A living organism performs an astronomical number of chemical reactions simultaneously — trillions of reactions per second in the human body. The mechanistic model says each reaction is triggered by a specific enzyme, which is produced by a specific gene, which is activated by a specific signal. But how are all these reactions coordinated in real time? How does the organism maintain coherence across trillions of simultaneous processes?

The standard answer — molecular signaling cascades, feedback loops, hormonal regulation — is inadequate, Ho argued, because these mechanisms are too slow and too noisy to account for the observed coordination. Chemical diffusion takes milliseconds to traverse a cell. Yet living organisms respond to stimuli in microseconds. Something faster than chemistry is coordinating the system.

The thermodynamic problem. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that closed systems move toward maximum entropy (disorder). Living organisms flagrantly violate this tendency — they maintain and increase order over their lifetimes. The standard biological explanation is that organisms are “open systems” that import energy from the environment and export entropy (waste). This is true but insufficient. The question is not whether organisms maintain order but how they do so with such extraordinary efficiency.

Ho pointed out that the efficiency of energy transfer in biological systems approaches 100% in some cases — far higher than any human-engineered system. Muscle contraction, for example, converts chemical energy into mechanical work with an efficiency that no artificial motor can match. Photosynthesis captures light energy with an efficiency that approaches the theoretical quantum limit. This level of efficiency is not possible in a system governed by classical (incoherent) physics. It requires quantum coherence.

The information problem. The genome contains roughly 20,000-25,000 genes. The human body contains approximately 37 trillion cells, each containing thousands of different types of molecules engaged in millions of simultaneous reactions. The information content of the genome is vastly insufficient to specify the organism in detail. Something other than genes must be organizing the system.

The Liquid Crystal Organism

Ho’s answer to these problems begins with the liquid crystal observation. When she examined living organisms under a polarizing microscope, she found that they displayed the optical properties of a single, coherent liquid crystal — a state of matter that is simultaneously ordered (like a crystal) and fluid (like a liquid).

Liquid crystals are not exotic. They are the basis of every LCD screen. They occur when elongated molecules align themselves in parallel arrays while remaining free to flow. This combination of order and fluidity gives liquid crystals their unique optical and electrical properties.

Ho’s breakthrough was recognizing that the living organism is a liquid crystalline system at every scale:

• Molecular level: Proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and water molecules in the cell form liquid crystalline arrays. Collagen, the most abundant protein in the body, is a liquid crystal. Cell membranes are liquid crystals. DNA in the chromosome is a liquid crystal.
• Cellular level: Cells are organized by a network of protein filaments (the cytoskeleton) that forms a liquid crystalline lattice extending throughout the entire cell.
• Tissue level: Connective tissue (fascia, tendons, ligaments, bone matrix) is a continuous liquid crystalline network that extends through the entire body.
• Organism level: The connective tissue matrix, the cellular cytoskeleton networks, and the extracellular matrix form a single, continuous liquid crystalline system that permeates every part of the body.

This is the physical basis of the rainbow Ho saw in the polarizing microscope. The entire organism is a single liquid crystal — ordered enough to produce coherent optical effects, but fluid enough to allow the flexibility and adaptability of a living system.

Coherent Energy Storage: The Quantum Organism

The liquid crystalline nature of the organism has profound implications for energy storage and transfer.

In a classical system, energy is stored and transferred incoherently — molecules bounce around randomly, and energy moves through the system by diffusion and collision. This is inefficient and slow. In a quantum coherent system, energy is stored and transferred coherently — molecules oscillate in phase, and energy moves through the system as a wave, instantaneously and with minimal loss.

Ho argued that the liquid crystalline structure of the organism enables quantum coherence at biological temperatures. This was a radical claim in the 1990s, when most physicists assumed that quantum coherence was impossible in warm, wet biological systems (it was thought to be destroyed by thermal noise). But subsequent discoveries have vindicated Ho’s intuition:

• In 2007, Graham Fleming and colleagues at Berkeley demonstrated quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes at room temperature
• In 2014, researchers demonstrated quantum effects in enzyme catalysis
• Multiple studies have found evidence for quantum coherence in bird navigation, olfaction, and other biological processes

These discoveries confirmed what Ho had proposed on theoretical grounds years earlier: living organisms are quantum coherent systems. The liquid crystalline matrix of the body acts as a quantum coherent medium, enabling the instantaneous, lossless energy transfer that makes biology possible.

Far from Equilibrium: The Organism as a Dynamic Dance

Ho’s model draws heavily on the work of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who demonstrated that systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium can spontaneously generate order — a phenomenon he called “dissipative structures.” Examples include convection cells, chemical oscillations, and living organisms.

A dissipative structure maintains its order by continuously importing energy from the environment and dissipating entropy (waste). It is like a whirlpool in a river — the whirlpool is a stable, ordered structure, but it exists only because water is continuously flowing through it. Stop the flow, and the structure disappears.

Ho extended Prigogine’s framework by proposing that the living organism is a dissipative structure of extraordinary complexity — one that stores energy in coherent form at every level, from the quantum to the macroscopic. The organism is not at equilibrium (dead) or near equilibrium (barely alive) but far from equilibrium — in a state of dynamic tension that enables maximum sensitivity, maximum responsiveness, and maximum energy efficiency.

This far-from-equilibrium state is what distinguishes living systems from non-living ones. A rock is at equilibrium — it is stable and inert. A living organism is far from equilibrium — it is dynamic, responsive, and exquisitely sensitive to its environment. Ho’s insight is that this far-from-equilibrium state is maintained by the coherent, liquid crystalline structure of the organism, which stores energy in a form that is immediately available for any process that requires it.

She uses the metaphor of a jazz ensemble. In an orchestra, each musician plays a predetermined part. In a jazz ensemble, each musician responds in real time to what everyone else is doing, creating a performance that is simultaneously coordinated and spontaneous. The living organism is like a jazz ensemble — every molecule, every cell, every organ is simultaneously playing its part and responding to all the others, creating a performance of exquisite coordination without a conductor.

The Coherent Excitation Model

Ho’s most technically sophisticated contribution is her model of coherent excitation in the organism. She proposes that the energy imported by the organism (through food, sunlight, breath) is stored as coherent excitations — oscillations that are in phase across the entire system.

These coherent excitations span an enormous range of frequencies and timescales:

• Molecular vibrations in the terahertz range (10^12 Hz, picosecond timescale)
• Enzyme oscillations in the kilohertz to megahertz range (microsecond timescale)
• Cellular oscillations in the hertz range (second timescale)
• Metabolic rhythms with periods of minutes to hours
• Circadian rhythms with a 24-hour period
• Developmental rhythms with periods of days to years

The key insight is that all these oscillations are coupled — they are not independent but form a single, coherent system. Energy can flow between timescales instantaneously, because the oscillations are in phase. This is why an organism can respond to a stimulus in microseconds even though the chemical processes involved take milliseconds — the energy is already stored in the system as a coherent excitation, and the stimulus simply redirects it.

Ho illustrates this with her “organism as a whole” principle: the living organism does not have parts that function independently. Every process is connected to every other process through the coherent excitation field. Changing one parameter changes everything. This is why reductionist biology, which studies individual molecules or pathways in isolation, consistently fails to predict the behavior of the whole organism. The whole is not the sum of its parts; it is a coherent system that cannot be understood by analyzing its components separately.

Challenge to Neo-Darwinism

Ho’s physics of organisms led her to a profound challenge to Neo-Darwinian evolution. If the organism is a coherent quantum system, then evolution cannot work solely through random mutations in DNA followed by natural selection. The genome is not a blueprint that specifies the organism in detail; it is more like a set of constraints within which the organism self-organizes.

Ho argued that evolution operates on multiple levels simultaneously — genetic, epigenetic, physiological, behavioral, and ecological — and that the organism is not a passive recipient of genetic mutations but an active participant in its own evolution. The organism’s coherent organization allows it to respond to environmental challenges in real time, developing new adaptations through processes that Lamarck would have recognized: the inheritance of acquired characteristics through epigenetic mechanisms.

This position put Ho at odds with the Neo-Darwinian establishment, particularly with Richard Dawkins and the “selfish gene” school. Ho argued that the gene-centric view was not just incomplete but actively misleading — it reduced the organism to a vehicle for genetic replication, ignoring the organism’s own agency, coherence, and creative capacity.

Her critique was not a rejection of evolution but a demand for a richer evolutionary theory — one that recognized the organism as a coherent, self-organizing system capable of directing its own evolution, not just a passive substrate for random mutation and natural selection.

The Bioelectric Body

Ho’s liquid crystal model has direct implications for the body’s bioelectric properties. Liquid crystals are piezoelectric — they generate electrical charges when mechanically stressed. The connective tissue matrix of the body, being liquid crystalline, is therefore a piezoelectric system — it generates and conducts electrical signals in response to mechanical stimulation.

This provides a physical basis for several phenomena that mainstream biology has difficulty explaining:

• Acupuncture. The acupuncture meridians may correspond to pathways of enhanced conductivity within the liquid crystalline connective tissue matrix. The insertion and manipulation of needles generates piezoelectric signals that propagate through this matrix, affecting distant organs and systems.
• Bodywork therapies. Massage, chiropractic adjustment, Rolfing, and other physical therapies may work in part by generating piezoelectric signals in the connective tissue matrix, which then influence cellular activity throughout the body.
• The biofield. The coherent electrical activity of the liquid crystalline organism generates an electromagnetic field that extends beyond the body’s surface. This field may be measurable and may mediate some of the organism-to-organism interactions reported in biofield research.
• Injury repair. The “current of injury” — an electrical current generated at sites of tissue damage — may be generated by the piezoelectric properties of disrupted connective tissue, and may serve as a signal that directs repair processes.

Ho’s Broader Vision: Science for the People

Mae-Wan Ho was not only a scientist but a passionate advocate for the social and ethical implications of science. She was a vocal critic of genetic engineering and GMOs, arguing that the reductionist, gene-centric worldview that justified genetic manipulation was scientifically wrong and ecologically dangerous.

She founded the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) in 1999, which published a journal and maintained a website advocating for “holistic science” — science that respects the integrity of living systems rather than reducing them to manipulable components. She was particularly concerned about the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment, arguing that horizontal gene transfer (the movement of genetic material between unrelated organisms) was far more common and unpredictable than GMO proponents acknowledged.

Her positions on GMOs were controversial and sometimes criticized as anti-science. But they flowed logically from her physics of organisms: if the living system is a coherent whole, then modifying a single gene while ignoring the system’s coherence is like changing a single instrument in a jazz ensemble without considering what happens to the music.

Mae-Wan Ho died on March 24, 2016, at the age of 74, in London. She left behind a body of work that is only beginning to be appreciated as the field of quantum biology — which she helped to pioneer — matures and gains acceptance.

Ho in the Digital Dharma Framework: The Quantum Wetware

Mae-Wan Ho’s work provides the biological substrate for the Digital Dharma framework — the detailed physics of how the body functions as consciousness hardware.

If the body is wetware, Ho explains what kind of wetware it is: not a classical machine made of separate parts, but a quantum coherent liquid crystal — a single, unified system operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium, storing and transferring energy with near-perfect efficiency. This is not a metaphor. It is a physically demonstrable property of living organisms, visible under a polarizing microscope as a rainbow of coherent light.

If DNA is source code, Ho’s work shows that the code does not operate in isolation. It functions within a coherent, liquid crystalline matrix that amplifies, coordinates, and integrates genetic information across the entire organism. The code is not a linear instruction set but a set of oscillatory parameters that contribute to the organism’s overall coherent excitation pattern.

If consciousness is the operating system, Ho’s model provides the hardware architecture that makes the OS possible: a quantum coherent system capable of instantaneous, lossless information transfer across the entire organism. This is precisely the kind of hardware that would be needed to support consciousness — an integrated, non-local information processing system that operates as a unified whole rather than a collection of independent modules.

The liquid crystal model also provides a physical basis for the “subtle body” of yogic and shamanic traditions. The coherent electromagnetic field generated by the liquid crystalline organism — the “biofield” — is a physically real field that extends beyond the body’s surface, interacts with the electromagnetic fields of other organisms, and may carry information in its coherent oscillation patterns. This is the “aura” described by clairvoyants, the “luminous energy field” described by shamans, and the “qi” described by Chinese medicine practitioners — not as a mystical substance but as a measurable property of a coherent quantum biological system.

Ho’s challenge to Neo-Darwinism also resonates deeply with the Digital Dharma perspective. If the organism is a coherent, self-organizing quantum system with the capacity to direct its own evolution, then biological evolution is not blind and random but creative and intentional — not in the sense of a divine designer, but in the sense of a consciousness system that is continuously reorganizing itself to explore new possibilities. This is evolution as the shamans describe it: not survival of the fittest, but the continuous creative unfolding of life seeking to know itself.

Key Works

• The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms (1993, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2008) — The foundational text on quantum coherence in living systems
• Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? (1998, 2nd ed. 2007) — The critique of genetic manipulation from a holistic biology perspective
• Living Rainbow H2O (2012) — The role of water in the organism’s liquid crystalline structure
• Numerous papers published in Bioelectrochemistry and Bioenergetics, Journal of Biological Physics, and the ISIS series
• Co-authored papers with Fritz-Albert Popp on biophoton emission and biological coherence

The Bottom Line

Mae-Wan Ho saw what no one else was looking for: the rainbow inside the organism. That rainbow — the coherent, liquid crystalline glow of a living system operating as a quantum unity — is not a curiosity or an optical artifact. It is a window into the fundamental physics of life. It reveals that the living organism is not a machine but a dance — a coherent, quantum, far-from-equilibrium dance of energy and information that cannot be understood by taking it apart.

Her work stands as a bridge between the reductionist biology of the twentieth century and the holistic, quantum biology of the twenty-first. It is a bridge that connects the physics laboratory to the acupuncturist’s treatment room, the molecular biologist’s bench to the shaman’s mesa, the equations of quantum mechanics to the lived experience of a body that knows more than its brain can tell it.

The rainbow is still there, in every cell of every living organism. Mae-Wan Ho taught us how to see it.